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Listen to our Lalela uLwandle Audio Play by Dylan McGarry
Making our stories accessible in a post COVID19 world
The experience of COVID19 has been disruptive for us as it has been for almost every human being on the planet. We were scheduled to take our show Lalela uLwandle (Listen to the Sea) on a tour to other parts of South Africa, as well as internationally. We were so looking forward to sharing this production in Lisbon, Portugal where we had been invited to stage the show at the World Oceans Conference. As this was no longer possible, we discussed how we might continue to share our work, and to create public listening spaces to surface silent and untold stories from our recent research into Ocean Livelihoods, heritage and governance in South Africa.
With this in mind (factoring in the limitations of social distancing and lockdown restrictions) our team came together online, under the guidance of director and lead script writer Neil Coppen, and re-invented the theatrical production as an immersive audio play with an all-encompassing sound design by resident sound-magician Tristan Horton. The audio version also debuts an orginal score developed by Gary Thomas and Guy Buttery. This audio version of Lalela uLwandle will be shared across radio stations and podcast channels both locally and internationally (with interactive post-show talk-back panels with the Empatheatre team) as well as be made available to teachers to use as a learning resource in schools.
We warmly invite you to make a cup of tea, plug in some head-phones, close your mouths and open your ears and spend the next hour in the thrall of storytellers Mpume Mtombeni (Nowandle), Alison Cassels (Faye) and Rory Booth (Niren). In many ways we feel this iteration speaks even more carefully to the delicate and important stories we have become custodians of.
Enjoy.
Empatheatre with support from the Bertha House, is excited to be hosting a screening and post-film discussion around Complicite’s film Can I Live? at the Bertha House cinema in Cape Town on the 12th of October from 16:00 - 19:30.
Empatheatre and Mbazwana Creative Arts (MCA)in association with Amehlo Productions are proud to present a short documentary film centring on the devising of their acclaimed musical theatrical production Umkhosi Wenala .
How do we make sense of the violent histories that mark our past? This play, Isidlamlilo, forces us to engage seriously with this question. Depending on your own relationship with our violent history, this play awakens a profound and at times unsettling realization that history is a living breathing force in all our lives. Isidlamlilo is set in the dying days of Apartheid, and in the present democratic South Africa.