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Secrets of a Woman's Soul |
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Written by RM
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Friday, 06 November 2009 |
A Project Preview
Old Linga: My heart wept for my mother and all the women of her generation who had endured the ravages of ignorance and stigmatisation by a self-righteous morally bankrupt society.
The actresses come together behind Beata and do a choral performance of the following:
This closed cupboard of a society.
A door that opens onto a cavernous closet
Fetid with secrets and shame.
Mangled infants
Mutilated little organs
Little girls' screams
Muffled by outsize hands
Bruised lips shushed with sweets
Or threats of the cutting knife.
Wives and sweethearts
Forced to open up to organs
Festering in sores
Dripping pus
Afraid to tell
A secret kept for life
Fathers that sire with their daughters
Faith healers, priests and n'angas
With old abandoned women in their huts
Bones cracking and snapping in the dark of night
Housemaids
Factory workers
Secretaries
Students
Working extra hours
On their backs and knees
Forced by threats
Dismissal or failure
Rabbits trapped in the glare
Thrown by the wayside
Flapping and sliding
In the slime
Behind the closet door,
The fetid rotting air
Of the closet
Of shameful secrets.
Secrets society refuses to face
Afraid of the mirror
Afraid of what it will see
The blood and tears of the innocents
The silent screams
The pleading eyes
Their own collusion
In the horrors of the closet.
(Extract from the final episodes of the play based on Lutanga Shaba's "Secrets
of a Woman's Soul")
Project Preview
The New Horizon Theatre Company and CHIPAWO Girl Power have a joint project in gender, which they are previewing on Monday morning at 10.30am (9th November) at the CHIPAWO Media Centre at Northwood Shopping Centre, 30 Tunsgate, Mt Pleasant. The audience is extremely limited but if you would like to attend please reply to this e-mail.
The presentation will consist of a preview performance by Girl Power based on and developed for the theatre from the participatory theatre communication text they piloted with the support of the European Commission, based on Lutanga Shaba's book, "Secrets of a Woman's Soul". Lutanga Shaba is the Founder and Director of the Women's Trust of Zimbabwe and the book bravely tells the story of her mother and simultaneously herself as women negotiating the pitfalls and traumas of Zimbabwean women of two generations as they face various choices relating to poverty, sexual abuse and HIV/AIDS.
New Horizon Theatre Company (see short profile attached) are planning to perform this play when funding can be secured. This preview is designed to introduce the project to friends and supporters as part of New Horizon and CHIPAWO's efforts to raise funds for the project.
Although this is a preview, we believe that in itself it will be a stimulating and moving experience in the theatre. We look forward to having you with us.
RM
Acting Performances Director
PROFILE: New Horizon Theatre Company
The New Horizon Theatre is a new theatre company based in Harare. Its members are young actors and actresses who have graduated either from CHIPAWO and its various performing groups or from the Zimbabwe Academy of Arts Education for Development with a Diploma in Performing Arts or a Diploma in Media Arts from the Midlands State University in Zimbabwe.
The company represents not only a new horizon but also a new breed of trained and experienced young performers, who have been in performance since they were very young and have many stage appearances under their belt. The company came into existence when the performers who had been active in the Harare Youth Theatre joined forces with other CHIPAWO graduates, some of them already employed by CHIPAWO, to form a theatre company. Many of the members had taken part in various CHIPAWO productions when they were still in CHIPAWO, including Meeting Place 2000, and also in the Wills and Inheritance Laws Campaign, when they performed four plays relating to wills and inheritance nationally. Some of them had gone on to join the first intake in the Academy's diploma programme.
In the period before the formation of the company, the Academy secured a number of contracts from organisations such as UNDP for plays on various relevant themes such as poverty and peace. Stephen Chifunyise wrote the scripts and directed the young graduates in these productions. CHIPAWO was also attempting to establish Zimbabwean repertory youth theatre at the Reps Theatre in Harare. A one week long run of the play, Vicious (2003), was staged there and this was followed by another run of two weeks of the same play. Vicious turned out to be a masterpiece of the Zimbabwean theatre and the young actors more than did the play justice.
The same cast went on to stage another of Chifunyise's plays, Soul Sister Comes to Africa (2004), also at Reps Theatre. It was during these performances that the young members of the cast decided to establish themselves as New Horizon.
New Horizon's next play, The Little Man of Murewa (2005), adapted from Hans Christian Andersen's story, 'Little Claus and Big Claus', was an ideal vehicle for this company. The material was closely related to their own experience and all of them would have been exposed to the characters and situations the play depicts. The actors in the New Horizon Theatre, as they are graduates of CHIPAWO, are extremely versatile and the play afforded ample opportunities for music and dance.
The Little Man of Murewa premiered at the Harare International Festival of the Arts in 2005, had a two week run at the Reps Theatre, Harare, and then was performed in Denmark at the Meeting Place 2005 Theatre Festival in Esbjerg as well at other venues in Copenhagen, Jutland and Zeeland. The company is adept at conducting workshops with children and performing music and dance. While in Denmark they gave numerous street performances, concerts and workshops.
In 2006, as part of the Ibsen Centenary commemorations, New Horizon staged a Zimbabweanisation of Henrik Ibsen's dramatic poem, Peer Gynt, entitled A Journey to Yourself. It too was premiered at the Harare International Festival of the Arts and went on to have a two week run at the Reps Theatre, Harare, in repertory with a new production, an adaptation of Charles Mungoshi's classic novel, "Waiting for the Rain".
After the season at Reps, A Journey to Yourself toured to Masvingo, Gweru and Kadoma where it sparked a lot of interest and lively discussion with large school audiences. In the same year, actors from New Horizon presented extracts from four of Ibsen's plays at the main commemoration of the centenary at the National Art Gallery.
The following year happened to be the centenary of the death of the Norwegian composer, Eduard Greig, who had written a popular musical composition inspired by a play by Ibsen entitled the Peer Gynt Suite. The Embassy was sponsoring a musical duo, who played classical music on piano accordions, to the festival. Included in their performance was to be the Peer Gynt Suite. The Embassy suggested a collaboration between New Horizon, who had acted the play, and the musicians who were to play the music. The result was an exciting and challenging collaboration which fused the music of Greig with dance, poetry, dialogue and mime.
In 2007 there was no season at the Reps but in addition to the Peer Gynt Suite, New Horizon revived the earlier play, Soul Sister Comes to Afrika with a new cast for the Onstage television series (see below).
As a result of the interest that the Ibsen Centenary had aroused in Ibsen's writing, a play of his was included in the 'O' Level syllabus, A Doll's House. A local publisher, Weaver Press, published the text and New Horizon decided to perform an adaptation of the play itself. The Norwegian Embassy supported a combined Book Launch cum Opening Night reception at the Reps Theatre and the play was performed for a week at the Theatre Upstairs.
In the first half of 2007, CHIPAWO Media launched a series of performances filmed on stage for television called Onstage. To date all the above plays have featured on television in the series, with the video of "A Journey to Yourself" recently being screened at the Ibsen Museum in Oslo. .
The DirectorsStephen Chifunyise
Chifunyise is undoubtedly the foremost playwright in Zimbabwe, with many plays to his credit, a great many of which have been performed by different companies with great success all over Zimbabwe and a number of collections of his plays and stories have been published..
Robert McLaren
McLaren has a long career in theatre in South Africa, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe as an actor, director, playmaker, academic and author. His published works include "South African People's Plays", "Making People's Theatre" and "Ngoma: approaches to arts education in Southern Africa"..
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