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South Africa

Loss, the Silent Room
 Recognising the Communal in the Transitionary

By Uvile Memory Samkelisiwe Ximba (writer) and Toby Mpendulo Ngomane (editor) 

Reflecting on a site-specific performance exhibition at the Windybrow Theatre in Hillbrow, this article considers a communal journey of repair, rebirth, and recovery, made through stories, song, memories, words, walking, silence, stillness, laughter, dance … and all the life in between.
How do we seek healing or repair when what is lost still sits in the present? When it becomes a memory, an echo? How do we craft rooms and spaces to hold all that we are in the moment of loss, through the loss?

What first captured my attention about the Windybrow Theatre in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, were the doors. Doors, openings, entrances, exits. Always an out, an alternate way to arrive at your destination. They connected to form a repetitive maze with few endings and a suggestion of perpetual movement. You could peek through three different doors into the same room, decide which way suited you, and encounter new people from the sheer surprise of landing in a room you did not expect.

The doors were not the only openings that interested me, however. The 127-year-old mansion has windows everywhere, at almost all angles. In the upstairs studio you walk into a space enclosed by tall windows. The transparency this creates means that in every room you are looking and being looked at. You experience the city around you. And you’re constantly located in the surroundings of the performing arts centre.

From experimenting with the doors and framing of the house, to witnessing the city as an extension of our rehearsals and sessions, we got to know the house we were working in. Originally built as a ‘token of love’, it has functioned, sequentially, as a Boer war officer’s mess, a boarding house, the residence of a nursing college, a nursing museum and, since the 1980s, as a performing arts centre.

Getting to know the history of the home, and juxtaposing that history with its current use as a community centre, raised various questions around ownership, evolution, and the state of ongoing death and loss that inevitably arises with change. Each of the four pieces of the site-specific performance exhibition pulled from, and fed into, these elements of loss in various ways, as did the rehearsal processes for the works.

 

Performance 1: The Life & Death Of An Orange by Uvile Ximba

‘Once you’ve peeled an orange, you cannot put it back together again,’ someone once said. This work is a tribute to and a celebration of loss and time. It explores memory and monuments and the parallels existing in life and death, pain and pleasure, desire and repulsion, loss and discovery. The work uses text, ritual, song, and physical performance to journey with the audience.

This piece was a collage, a culmination of years of loss and grief, but also re-memory and comfort after pain. I pieced it together from memories, stories told to me about deceased loved ones, hopes, and bits of sound and movement that my body remembered and stored in mourning. It was a private process. Not secret, but private, involving a lot of quiet reflection and endless doubt.

I found the stories before I found the performativity of it. Hence, I chose to share it as a story and to release the forced obligation to ‘perform’. It sat at the beginning of the exhibition journey as it asked, ‘We are here to share, to cry, to remember, and to joy. Yes, a verb, to joy. Will you please join us in these simple, big life things?’

Performance 2: Blue, by Belita Andre

Blue is a multi-sensory experience tapping into sense, sight, sound, and embodiment. Designed to be an immersive encounter for the audience, it invites us on Belita’s journey as she searches through, and creates, the sonic landscape that houses her poetry.

This process was particularly focused on supporting Belita’s desire to find the musicality and the sonic scape of her writing. Spoken words are bits of sound melded together to form, evoke, and convey meaning. Working with Belita was about going beneath her poetry, into the subtext, to see what textures, melodies, and sounds existed there. This involved extensive and, at times, slow work between herself and Toby; going over the same sentence or phrase for several rehearsals, to dig into the flavour of each word.

It became a sound experience we had not anticipated and which, with more time, we believe could have stood as a fully realised aesthetic experience on its own.

Performance 3: Township Phantasm, by Masai Sepuru

‘A story of a black African experienced by a deity. An exploration of township culture, music, love, and loss. The piece investigates the dichotomy of struggle and joy and how they interlink in the streets of a township; black is not a synonym for pain, even if it has gone through so much of it. Township Phantasm uses body, voice, and poetry to narrate a story of a God that chose to live through the life of a black man. He eventually learns the hard truth that cannot be otherwise experienced from the vantage point of Heaven,’ wrote Masai Sepuru.

Working with Masai was a lesson in the complexities of verbalisation. Toby and I are both trained in theatre, which can explore delivery in many ways, but that nevertheless views the elements of vocal work differently from slam poetry. Masai challenged us with ideas of pace and performance, and we, I hope, provoked him to test how his delivery could be more fluid. It is most difficult for me to summarize the experience of working with him, because it was the space in which I met the most contrast. Ease and flow, this rehearsal room demanded. And we were called to meet it.

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