We are about to tell you a story. Or, rather, pieces of a story. You can join the pieces together but never complete the picture – Mandla Mbothwe in Voices Made Night.
The venue is dark, dreamlike and disorientating. Populating the space are a series of characters and performative vignettes – a teacher haunted by archives, a crouched figure tending to a cluster of small graves, an intergenerational bond between mother and son, a sonic channeler, a towering controller of worlds and a researcher attempting to make sense of it all. Smoke mingles with resonant sound and light. Reeds, flames, and textual motifs flicker across the walls. Audience members enter the space and find their place amongst the elements, wading through memory and ritual, rooting through the narratives, wandering deeper into the metaphor.
For the second iteration of HOW | Showing the Making, presented by SO | The Academy for the Less Good Idea, award-winning Cape Town-based theatre-maker, playwright, researcher, curator, director, arts educator and Artistic Director of Mud&Fire Parables Mandla Mbothwe presents a process-based performance lecture. Working with six Johannesburg-based performers, Mbothwe offers the audience an immersive experience of live performance, incorporating the recurring visual and textual motifs in his work.
Performance as lecture, and vice-versa
Mbothwe’s How can be viewed as an immersive performance lecture in two parts. The first, taking place in the Events Space, is the durational, site-specific performance in which the audience is invited into a realm of ritual, excavation, storytelling and healing through performance. The second part takes place in The Less Good Lounge – a room just off the Events Space – and sees Mbothwe seated at a desk towards the back of the room. Here, the audience is invited to listen to a sonic collage of the artist in process – in dialogue with the work, the performers, with himself – before being able to engage Mbothwe directly about his process through a brief lecture and Q&A session.
Collaboration and collective narrative as the primary points of departure
The work presented by Mbothwe is the result of a two-day intensive workshop. When SO | The Academy for the Less Good Idea first approached Mbothwe to present his work and process as part of the HOW series, he was already in the process of revisiting, rethinking and remapping the past 20 years of his work. “I knew that if I was asked to come and give a lecture – to stand behind a podium and speak about my work – I was going to say no,” says Mbothwe. “But knowing The Centre and the kind of platform it is, I immediately saw it as a kind of performative lecture and an opportunity to respond to this question we grapple with – ‘How?’ The Centre then put me in touch with these six performers.”
Individual conversations between Mbothwe and the performers took place on Whatsapp. He then had them work with a collection of texts – his creative writing and directors notes to performers over the years. The exploration of dreams and songs, as well as the elements – earth, fire, water and wind – were also points of creative provocation. These components become the tools that construct Mbothwe’s productions and in this way, the process reaffirms the interconnectedness and the collaborative elements of his way of working. For Mbothwe, there is little in the way of sitting down and writing a script. Rather, he provides specific stimuli, suggestions, and invitations for artists and performers to interact with and to develop their own voices. Even the audience, rather than remaining passive observers, become active participants in the work, engaging in their own journeys, excavating their own histories and stories, and effectively contributing to the collective narrative.
“Everyone is involved, everyone is present. For me, that is the influence of the African oral tradition, but it’s also a direct influence of the cultural practices that have been informing our society. It’s that collectiveness, that village spirit if we can call it that,” explains Mbothwe.
Ritual performance, motif & methodology
The African tradition of oral storytelling, the reclamation of stolen memories and the excavation of the buried stories in order to feed the living are at the core of Mbothwe’s process. These methodologies assume a number of forms in his work – most often the recurring motifs of graves, reeds, mud, cowries, language, dreams and rituals. For Mbothwe, graves are also a rich metaphor for connection and excavation, a direct link to umhlaba (the land), language, bones, identity and more.
“There are so many herbs in our archives, so much knowledge and wisdom buried in our stories, in our forcibly archived stories. Bones can teach us so much about ourselves in a way,” he says.
Another vital point of entry into Mbothwe’s practice is his navigation of the literal and the figurative. When the motifs in his works are engaged with figuratively, he explains, is when they begin to form rituals. It is in the figurative and metaphorical engagement with these motifs through performance that they can begin to explode and expand upon the inherent symbolism of, for example, the candle, the grave, the cowrie or the mud. “[Rituals] incorporate spirituality, the soul, the body…They tell us that we are a multiple people, we are the results of other people’s actions and we continue becoming who we are because of those actions.”
Embracing the fragmentary
In addition to the performative elements of Mbothwe’s How, a collection of his texts, interviews, notes and conversations are woven throughout, projected onto walls and recited by performers. This palimpsestic view of the artist’s notebook – his “kraal of thoughts” – is a way into his thinking.
The resultant textual fragments are like aphorisms, prophesies, scriptures in the short form. “A girl is dancing in a beautiful thing,” reads one. “The chorus of the gossiper”, “Shame, pain, response, suffering, burden”, or “An old woman saying a verse from the bible”.
Mbothwe’s notes are also a form of instruction to himself, the performers and the audience. They are an exercise in excavating and piecing together an ongoing narrative towards healing: “We are about to tell you a story. Or, rather, pieces of a story. You can join the pieces together but never complete the picture,” is the refrain uttered by those ushering you into the performance. The line itself comes from Mbothwe’s last ever performance as an actor, in the 2000/2001 production Voices Made Night, an adaptation for the stage of selected short stories by the Mozambican author Mia Couto, directed by Mark Fleishman. “It is the line I have carried with me in all my work and process, as it articulates my obsessions with dreams, content and structure,” says Mbothwe.
Dreams, too, are inherently instructional and fragmented. As Mbothwe explains, language can be limiting, but dreams allow us to enter a space without limitation, encouraging us to embrace the fragmentation of our lives. “You don’t spend too much time trying to connect the dreams, but you spend each moment and each fragment to the fullest because you are so engrossed in that dream. And it changes you in a way,” says Mbothwe.
It is the content of the dream as well as its form and structure that informs Mbothwe’s practice and the construction of this performance.
“We are wounded. We will never be completely healed”: Towards a theatre of healing
Through this collective, collaborative, immersive and ritualistic mode of performance, the artist posits that we are able to build and participate in a “theatre of healing”. For Mbothwe, we are all searching for healing and, while we may never reach that point, the search itself will help us to heal better and to contribute to that collective journey. “Theatre is an attempt that fails”, says Mbothwe in the post-performance Q&A. “It might not always work, but each attempt brings us closer, helps us grow in our search for healing.”
– David Mann
PHOTOGRAPHER | Zivanai Matangi