speakING to PEOPLE's personal experiences
THE PERFORMANCEThe performance itself intends to create an accessible and identifiable portrait of the Fuleni Coal Mining plans, within the present and the future. Ensuring that the characters maintain this familiarity the protagonists should speak to audience’s personal experiences, culture and language directly. The main protagonists will be isiZulu speaking, and will revolve around a family: a mother, daughter and father living in a community near the proposed mine.
It is important that a strong woman protagonist features the performance as many of the livelihoods made vulnerable by the mine are those mostly impacted on women, such as water contamination, crop-land loss, vulnerability of medicinal plants and health and productivity of vegetable gardens.
Humor is a vital element in storytelling and is a means tackling difficult and complex issues, and enables these to be unpacked and safely examined. We work sincerely and constructively with humor and comedy, and this performance will use contextual comedy and local idioms drawn from the community illuminate the difficult and controversial parts of the story. The performance will employ a visual theatrical vocabulary that is accessible and relevant, and will use song, dance, and a dynamic narrative that allows the audience and participants to travel the journey of familiar characters that are instantly identifiable. |