Tswalo debuts at Market Theatre

Lusanda Zokufa

Award-winning Tswalo makes its debut at the Market Theatre from 2 to 27 October.

  Tswalo, is the winner of the Standard Bank Ovation Award, Cape Town Fringe Fresh Performer Award and Cape Town Fringe Fresh Creative Award for Directing.

  In Tswalo, the performer’s expression of his spiritual “source” gives the audiences the baton to walk through their own paradigm of ontology.

  The poetry, prose and physical storytelling furnish us with the necessary tools into a deep meditation.

  Tswalo is a body of poems constructed to fragment a narrative that is carried in both physicality and voice.

  It is placed in a timeless space of existence, which explores the primary themes of being, chaos and beauty, blood and birth, love and war in the same frame. It combines ritual, physical storytelling and heightened text to create new distinct theatrical language as a way of reconstructing and deconstructing the orthodox and the traditional chronology of telling stories.

  The multi award-winning production has played to sold-out houses and received great reviews and rapturous responses such as “This is what theatre should, and can be.” – Weekend Special, “Mystical made manifest” – The Critter, “World-Class performance…” – theatre scene CT and “Tswalo is intelligent theatre” – artscomments.

  The production played to critical acclaim in South Africa, Namibia, Germany and Scandinavia, and comes back to Johannesburg at the Market Theatre from 2 to 27 October at The Barney Simon Theatre.

  The delightful and masterful work is written and performed by Billy Langa with direction, dramaturgy and design by Mahlatsi Mokgonyana in collaboration with award-winning composer and sound designer John Withers.