Makanda Mahlanu (The Snake with Five Heads)
Natal Performing Arts Council, South Africa
kwaZulu Natal and Durban region tour
56 performances
devised directed
Wide-eyed children, as young as two and three watched the performance in rapturous delight while grey-haired men and old toothless women chuckled alongside their families. The story, which captured the attention of the audience for over an hour, was about an autocratic five-headed snake’s search for the perfect wife.
The Sunday Times, Durban
The play itself has a lively circus quality which when, caught at poetic moments, boarders on Fellini surrealism. Theater of the absurd? Not quite, but almost. Provocative theatre that’s not pedantic but extremely powerful and poignant.
Within ten minutes the five of them had enthralled the locals with spontaneous street theatre that had them surrounded by a laughing, singing, dancing crowd of 200 villagers. At Berea Station these five actors danced and sang and entranced an audience of over 1,000 commuters.
The Natal Mercury
The most important part of these programmes was the research done into the methodology of creating these works. To this end we started to collect a body of research material. Without Mr. Riccio's tireless input these would not have been possible. He has shown an uncanny ability of walking into a foreign culture and developing a theatre language that transcends all barriers. We look forward to to long association.
Themi Venturas, Artistic Director, Kwasa Group, South Africa
Politics, Slapstick and Zulus on Tour
Wearing an oversized sombrero and carrying the rhythm with cymbals, Yise Gasa announced to the curious, almost frightened faces that some-thing quite out of the ordinary was going to happen. For the gathering section of our performance, I wore a Roman helmet made originally for some forgotten production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,“ and over-sized hands of white gloved foam to greet, wave, and attract people to our performance. Yise and I roamed the outdoor market clowning, shaking hands, patting children’s heads, and comically cajoling people to attend our performance.
Crossing the street from the main market, our performance adrena-line pumping as I shouted some mad nonsense, I stopped, realizing that it was right there, only days before, that two people died and scores were injured when a hail of AK47 bullets assaulted a transit bus. The distant abstraction of a front-page newspaper report, and photos of sprawled bodies in blood pools was jolted to life with a shock. Across the street was the taxi rank where 50-plus Zulu-owned passenger kombis stood. The kombi owners and Moslem Indian-owned bus companies were at war, the latter trying to undercut the Zulu taxi business and gain access to a very lucrative and growing market. The situation was remi-niscent of the territorial gangsters in Chicago during the 1920s. Such a confluence of images, ideas, and feelings made South Africa a unique complexity. Politics, however, was only one element that blended into the complex swirl of history, race, greed, money, and power at a time of monumental change.
It was December 1993 and a group consisting of four Zulu actors, a Danish percussionist, and I performed street theatre in the township of kwaMashu, 35 kilometers outside Durban, in the province of Natal, South Africa. In the southern hemisphere, December is the height of summer, and being near the coast of the Indian Ocean means humidity with temperatures around 90F--with an unrelenting sun. When we pulled into the kwaMashu bus and train station with our new white “kombi,” a ten-seat Toyota van, we caught the attention of many. Shoppers and merchants alike turned to stare intently, their bodies suddenly still as our kombi passed through the open-air market. But the children--the dozens of smiling faces and excited eyes--paused for only a beat before they trotted along side the vehicle, jumping up and trying to peek through the windows.
The swelter of the heat reflecting off the tarmac created a languid atmosphere that people seemed to swim through, the tropical atmos-phere belying an underlying tension of caution and alertness. Walking around the busy station to determine the best performance area only added to the stir of curiosity and uneasiness of the passing crowds. In kwaMashu, considered one of the most violent townships in South Af-rica, strangers and unusual activity drew attention and were immedi-ately suspicious. This was especially so during the time of rising fear and uncertainty that preceded the country’s first multi-racial elections.
KwaMashu, as with most other of Natal‘s townships, was predomi-nately Zulu. Established under apartheid, townships were set up as ra-cially defined areas-cum-ghettos that geographically isolated non-whites from the white areas where they served as domestic and industrial la-borers. Since the lifting of the last of apartheid’s laws in 1990s the situation has, in reality, altered little. Blacks may now travel, work, and live wherever they choose in the “new” South Africa, but few can afford these newfound freedoms. The legacy of apartheid’s social, economic, and psychological traumas will take generations to remedy. And, as elsewhere in the world, racial segregation has given way to a “new world order” based on economic stratification.
download complete article
