Schools Festival at Joburg Theatre in April

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The 2019 Joburg Theatre Schools Setworks Festival will run from 23 April to 5 May at the Joburg Theatre and feature two acclaimed productions, Sophiatown and Itsoseng.“School learners stand to benefit a great deal as both stories are on the current high school’s setworks curriculum.

 

The shows are also open to the general public, with a special double-bill price for Saturdays at R200, as we believe that both Sophiatown and Itsoseng are important to South African’s experience as a whole,” says Makhaola Ndebele, Artistic Director for Joburg City Theatres.” Audiences will be treated to a back-to-back theatre experience to kick start their weekend – the first show starts at 6pm and the second one at 8pm.”

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Sophiatown is presented by Joburg City Theatres in partnership with The South African State Theatre. It has been revived with a fresh and young cast to resonate with today’s audiences and includes the timeless ‘Kofifi’ style of music, which made the original production so famous.

Under the experienced eye of the State Theatre’s multi-award-winning Artistic Director, Aubrey Sekhabi, Sophiatown features on stage Phumlani Mdlalose (Jakes), Caitlin Clerk (Ruth), Terrence Ignacious Ngwila (Mingus), Kenneth Mlambo (Fahfee), Barileng Malebye (Princess), Madge Kola (Mamariti), Zama Ngubane (Lulu), and Bongani Masango/ Maurice Matyutyu (Charlie).

Sophiatown tells the extraordinary original story of journalists who set up a house together and advertise for an additional housemate to live with them. Despite the apartheid legislation of those days, they get permission for a white Jewish woman to move in when she turns up with a suitcase on their doorstep.

The play is interspersed with its famous Kofifi-styled a’ cappella harmony and original songs from that time period of Sophiatown. Songs that made the area legendary as a Black cultural hub and epicentre of politics, jazz and blues. It became known as the ‘Chicago of South Africa’. A place where shebeen queens, gangsters, politicians and Black and White ‘Bohemians’ rubbed shoulders and traded drinks in a heady buzz of music, style and rebellion. It symbolised a society that allowed freedom of action, association and expression; where people lived together in harmony, undivided by race or colour in a time when the very existence of a ‘mixed’ suburb was in direct contradiction to the apartheid policy of geographically separating people according to their skin colour. Its heydays finally ended when the authorities deliberately tore the area apart and to this day Sophiatown is synonymous with South Africa’s most famous musicians, artists, writers, journalists and politicians who were created there during the oppressive 1940s and 1950s.

Sekhabi’s directing work is popularly known in famous productions including Kalushi -The Story of Solomon Mahlangu, Rivonia Trial, Silent Voices, Marikana – The Musical, and The New Freedom Musical, to name a few.

Another gripping story about a radical time in South Africa’s more recent past is Itsoseng, which will run concurrently with Sophiatown and is about a man whose hope of a new life is crushed with the realities of a corrupt system.

This intense one-man play covers a period in South Africa spanning from the early 1990s to 2008. It looks at the township of Itsoseng which formed part of the Bophuthatswana homeland, set up by the apartheid government to segregate South Africans and led by the tyrannical Lucas Mangope. The show gives audiences a first-hand account of life in a South African township, and the endless cycle of ‘going to funerals and taverns’ as the main character, Mawilla, describes. And how through protesting and riots Itsoseng’s shopping centre and economic hub was burnt to the ground leaving the people living there in a loop of poverty and survival, where ‘luck has run out and hopes have faded’.

Although the province has since changed from Bophuthatswana to North West Province, Itsoseng is still feeling the wounds of the 1994 riots. The new struggle of the township is economy, just like in all the other townships throughout the country.

Through the authorship and direction of Omphile Molusi and a remarkable performance by Thapelo Sebogodi, audiences will be left on the edge of their seats in this gripping portrayal of a township lost. The story is further brought to life by the skills of set and costume designer Ntabiseng Malaka and lighting designing Hlomohang “Spider” Mothetho.

Tickets are available from R60 at www.joburgtheatre.com or by calling the box office on 0861 670 670 for group bookings with a special promotion on weekend performances discount of R100 for a double feature of Itsoseng and Sophiatown.

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