A musical performance featuring three original compositions, Song Cycle is a work that explores notions and activities of passivity, erasure, desire, and the importance of naming those forgotten women figures in mythological history.

It Is Best, composed by Clare Loveday and featuring text by Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu, opens the performance with a playful and contemplative dialogue between music (Lecoge-Zulu on flute) and text (Zarcia Zacheus on vocals). It’s a playful and engaging composition that experiments time and breath, both musically and in terms of their location in Season 8’s broader themes and provocations.

Following this, It Is Better Not To Be Seen sees Thembinkosi Mavimbela and Micca Manganye join Zacheus on stage. Mavimbela’s basswork is gentle and considered, while Manganye lends a deliberate percussion, as well as a lively multi-instrumentalism to the performance. Again, Zacheus’ vocals are delivered with a close attention to wordplay, building up to a brief, but powerful solo from Mavimbela before the song reaches a slow and gentle conclusion.

For the third and final song, Yemaja, Mavimbela brings out the upright bass, while Manganye introduces shakers to his steady percussion. Zacheus holds a firm and resonant refrain – a rallying call to the chorus who begin offstage and gradually join the trio. The result is a full and rich performance, punctuated by well-placed notes from Lecoge-Zulu’s flute. As the closing song, the performance swells and charges the space, its call-and-response style composition breaching the borders of the stage and reaching out to involve the audience.

All three songs, original collaborative compositions generated over the course of Season 8, reckon with the key provocations of the Season – that of breath and mythology – and serve to puzzle out, through performance and play, the broader themes of text, music, and their inherent relationships with language and the body.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

COMPOSERS | Yemaja by Zarcia Zacheus & Thembinkosi Mavimbela, It Is Better Not To Be Seen by Zarcia Zacheus, Thembinkosi Mavimbela & Clare Loveday, It Is Best by Clare Loveday & text by Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu
PERFORMERS | Zarcia Zacheus, Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu, Micca Manganye, Thembinkosi Mavimbela & Chorus