FITTING REWARD
IN 2010, the Theatre Arts Admin Collective (TAAC) established its Emerging Theatre Director Bursary (ETDB) programme.
It was meant to provide a vital platform to showcase the work of young directors, devise new work and stage existing texts, while often adapting them.
This year the ETDB has focused on black female directors. The winners are Thando Mangcu and Nwabisa Plaatjie.
Caroline Calburn, director at TAAC, said: “Young black women directors represented a small percentage of the overall profile of the ETDB winners over the past seven years. This had to change.”
Mangcu is directing Pieces – an original work which she has devised with the cast and which is described as “a futuristic comedy that explores existence in all its complexity”. It will be staged from Sunday until July 22 at the TAAC in Observatory. The cast includes Elizabeth Akudugu, Faith Kinniar, Grace Barnes and Nolufefe Ntshuntshe.
Mangcu has received widespread acclaim for The Fall – the piece she co-curated with Ameera Conrad – around the #FeesMustFall and other student movements. It was staged recently at the Baxter for the second time and is touring to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Mangcu, 23, who was born in Joburg, studied drama at UCT and graduated in 2015. She is dividing her time between Cape Town and Johannesburg.
“There are stories to tell and people with open ears, and this (the bursary) serves as a huge encouragement. I am also glad to be among such a group of people and to see myself with them as we grow. Although Pieces started as my concept, it has changed quite dramatically as it is a workshop piece of theatre devised by myself and the cast. In our rehearsal process we discussed ‘the gaze’ and how it affects us in a white patriarchal system.
“Not only the white male gaze, but also the gaze we face among woman, within this system – as being on the outside as well as the inside of a system.
“The narrative started with a girl who falls out of a system (Heaven) and lands into another one (Earth) and has to piece together an identity within this system, as dictated by those who supposedly want what’s best for her and the rules of the planet.
“That is how it started initially. But through further exploration and insights the story has evolved and is continuing to evolve.”
Plaatjie was born in Ugie in the Eastern Cape. She graduated as a theatre maker from UCT in 2015.
Plaatjie’s extensive body of work includes Identirrhaging (UCT 2015), Aha! and 23 Years, a month and 7 days (created with the support of the Magnet Theatre in 2016).
She is the first recipient of the Baxter Theatre Centre’s PlayLab playwriting residency and is currently writing a play where she puts “the artist on trial”.
Her adaptation of The Native Who Caused All The Trouble is on from July 30 until August 5. This seminal piece of struggle theatre – led mostly by white theatre makers – was first performed at The Market Theatre in 1986 and was written by Danny Keogh, Vanessa Cooke and Fink Haysom. It centres on Tselilo, a Basotho man who questions land ownership in Cape Town in the 1930s. In Plaatjie’s adaptation, the text is reimagined with a female protagonist.
“I came across the play, in Grade 10 when I had to find a monologue for my June exam.
“The play stayed with me, perhaps because Tselilo is a compassionate teacher. Beyond that, is the land question. The play seems so relevant in contemporary South Africa. Many things have changed but many things have remained the same…
“I’m interested in the fact that it is based in 1937 and I want to question our ways of remembering through the adaptation. The question that stayed with me long before I began this process is ‘how could I re-imagine a story that took place at a time in history where it seems colonial officials only came into
I thought in challenging our ways of remembering, I could tell this story with a black female protagonist
contact with indigenous people who were men?’ The resistance that they faced or were confronted with was mostly from men rather than women.
“I thought in challenging our ways of remembering, I could tell this story with a black female protagonist. By doing so, I am recognising that colonial officials also came into contact with politically conscious black women.
“I break the play down – choosing to tell only the narrative of Tselilo and letting that narrative be in conversation with the land question in contemporary South Africa… I have based the play in two time frames, 1937 and 2017, and I watch them intersect.”
The Theatre Arts Admin Collective is in the Methodist Church Hall, corner Milton Road and Wesley Street, Observatory. Tickets for Pieces and The Native Who Caused All The Trouble are R60 each. Book at 021 447 3683 or online http:// theatreartsadmincollective.weebly. com/book-tickets.html Five tickets are reserved for each performance as ‘Pay As You Can’ – on a first come first serve basis – which means you pay the amount you can afford.