Catch next year’s rising stars in Grahamstown
The National Arts Festival programme is huge, but if there’s one thing you know will be worth watching it’s the Standard Bank Young Artists. Catch next year’s crop of rising stars in Grahamstown between June 29 and July 9
WHEN you glance through the work of Monageng Vice Motshabi, the Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre 2017, what stands out is the way he ploughs back.
It’s about reclaiming history, and as a mentor and an educator, he has a longstanding relationship with the Market Laboratory, that wonderful collaborative space that produces so many young artists. “They gave me confidence, a sense of who I am.”
He enjoys working with young people, collaborating and in this way workshopping ideas that have led to the development of at least five new plays.
Only 33 years old, he is a storyteller who travels widely and dabbles in particular historical stories that look at the past in a completely different way. For the 2017 award performance, he’s taking a giant leap back in time, at least 500 years. “But it will relate to where we are,” he promises. And as is his wont, he will be collaborating. He is already throwing ideas about with long-time accomplice, Omphile Molusi
(Itsoseng, Cadres) who will be helping with the writing.
“I feed off other people’s intelligence,” says Motshabi as he praises his first mentor, Jabulani Hadebe, who ran a community theatre from Snake Park near Dobsonville and whose first play changed his life. “He unlocked all my potential,” is how Motshabi pays tribute.
His Book of Rebellations which he directed and co-wrote with Kgafela oa Magogodi, deals with corruption and greed in a post-apocalyptic setting and in 2015, he directed a revived The Story I Am About to Tell, revisiting the TRC period to rethink and reflect on that fragile period of the country’s past. It played at the Soweto Theatre, but should have travelled much more widely and might now have a better chance to do just that.
This is a young man who should be listened to when he tells stories. He breaks your heart.