Arco Music-Theater Project
The aim is to lift up the hidden role of black and brown women in the making of contemporary Africa. I use the medium of music theatre, creating engaging productions based on historical research that spans both the pre- and postcolonial period.
I am looking to make a project that is about storytelling and exchanging that knowledge and assisting activism on the ground. My practice is centered around music making and writing for voices. I structured it as a project that was about vocal, musical storytelling—essentially privileging the voice and using choral singing as a technique for community building.
This space is for people who were just finishing high school, or people who were just completing university, people wanting to put themselves out into the world, or the older generation who've worked in many fields and know the history of South Africa, from the colonial era to the apartheid era, and who wanted to share those stories with younger people.
The project is about trying to find moments in African history that had been obscured, made invisible particularly during the colonial era and the apartheid era and to try and bring those stories to the forefront—especially for a new generation of South Africans, who were, in my opinion, struggling to determine who as South Africans we were going to be as citizens in a democratic country.
PROBLEM ANALYSIS
I was thinking about South Africa as a country that was heading towards crisis—a state that is in the process of failing, a country that has elements and parts of failure that is exposed. It includes a lack of respectable governance, the lack of honesty, and the lack of integrity in our civil service, which is a primary concern.
The idea of corruption as an endemic in the country has become a common consensus with the experience of heightened levels of failure in infrastructure: roads are failing, electricity is failing, and all of these are to do with a long history of about 30 years of mismanagement and incompetence together.
The project, in the initial stages, was conceived to tell some of these stories and to valorize some of where we come from as a people—to convene a set of singers and performers to tell these stories through musical and platforms. The hope is for this to combat the lack of knowledge sharing in South Africa through art, and making collective art.
A key point I wanted to address was that in the black townships in South Africa there isn't provision for art schooling, so there is little training in the arts. I think that leaves out the South Africans, who are interested in storytelling and that we are as a country of storytellers. The oral culture is strong, the musical culture is strong, and the way we can recuperate history, I think is best performed through storytelling.
It's very key to me that the project becomes a cross generational project. We lack spaces where cross generational conversation happens. There's been a rift since the students protests of 1976 between the older generation, who are regarded as the sellouts to the government of apartheid and the young generation who are considered the hotheads who are mounting a revolution, and since those days we haven't had a very fluent conversation between parents and their children about our history. And so, my project seeks to address that gap, but in a way that was fun, enjoyable, and accessible to most people.
Impact
The project was met with much willingness from fellow artists, academic researchers and institutions such as UCT, Stellenbosch University, Soweto theatre, Raw Academy in Dakar, Fendika Arts Centre in Addis Ababa, The Jesuit Society Church in Cairo, Casa do Povo, Teatro Castro Alves and the Goethe Institut in Sao Paolo and Salvador, Brazil. We succeeded in hosting a number of low-key public events at all venues.
The support from AFRE allowed me to travel to meet collaborators in person, which proved indispensable as far as establishing links to other global projects working to end anti-black racism!
We are still able to convene once a week locally in South Africa. Younger peers are convening with the older generation and beginning to acquire more knowledge. The choir has become a home where people bring their challenges from home side, and they ask for help, and people within the choir are willing to assist and to volunteer.
It’s transformed into a platform where people are increasingly connecting with one another in ways those who were marginalized need to do in order to stay alive. Issues from the community are addressed in our platform, expanding beyond the purpose of a choir—just by virtue of the fact that we meet, and people bring their stories of what happened in their lives that week. People feel comfortable and safe asking for assistance with dealing with certain personal issues. The community has grown to become a platform where we don't just do the formal work of singing together and making songs together, but we really are people who hold one another, and that was a very strong intention of mine.
And so, there is joy in recognizing how what we've come from—the dark old days of apartheid—inform very positively what we are becoming today. The ability to tell the story and to narrate that bridge between these 2 South Africas that we now exist in is a very inspirational possibility, and it's moving to see people get excited about doing this work. Some of the people who come to hear us are the activists who are at the center of key activism—inspiring other communities to reflect on how these learnings from the old era could be very helpful for us in this moment of need.
