Liberating Our Histories: Shakespeare Schools Festival 2024

The Shakespeare Schools Festival Africa invites prospective participants to “embark on a journey of cultural reclamation celebrating the rich tapestry of African heritage”, reimagining Shakespeare’s plays in a local and contemporary context under the theme “Liberating Our Histories”.

According to Festival Managing Director Blythe Stuart Linger, “This is not just about Shakespeare; it’s about our stories, experiences, and voices. We invite participants from diverse backgrounds, including school learners, drama groups and community youth groups, to come together and explore the narratives within Shakespeare’s works, all while reimagining them in the vibrant context of modern Africa.”

Expanding the Festival’s multilingual offering is “at the heart of our Festival in 2024”, affirms Linger. In recent years, more and more participants have performed Shakespeare in translation - a continuation of “a rich heritage of Shakespearean translations” in South Africa (into languages like Setswana, Afrikaans, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Xitsonga, Sepedi, Sesotho and Tshivenda).

In addition, Linger notes, “We promote cultural translation, ensuring that each performance reflects the unique heritage of our participants. But our exploration goes beyond traditional theatre. We encourage various performance methods, from dance and movement to spoken word, acting, singing, and more. The stage becomes a canvas for self-expression, where everyone has a voice.”

So what are you waiting for? The Shakespeare Schools Festival Africa wants you to “be part of a cultural renaissance, a celebration of African history and tradition, and a journey of self-discovery and transformation where young minds thrive and stories take flight . . . From text to movement, from tradition to innovation, we’re liberating Shakespeare’s tales, one story at a time.”

Dates have been set for the Cape Town leg of the Festival, which will take place at the Star Theatre at the Homecoming Centre from 1 - 20 May. Dates for Johannesburg, Durban, George and other hosting cities and towns will be released early next year.

Speak Me A Speech at Woordfees

Two preview screenings in Stellenbosch during Woordfees 2023 will offer audiences a first look at a groundbreaking Shakespeare film project. Speak Me A Speech, the new film from Cape Town’s CineSouth Studios, produced in association with Wits University’s Tsikinya-Chaka Centre, is still in production, with shooting scheduled to continue to end 2024. The preview created by Speak Me A Speech director Victor van Aswegen for Woordfees from material filmed for the project to date gives a foretaste of the film.

The festival screenings are a rare opportunity for the public to get an early look into a forthcoming feature-length work still in production and meet the people behind the project. The Woordfees preview screenings, sponsored by EasyEquities, start at 2pm on Tuesday 10 and Friday 13 October in the Neelsie Cinema on the Stellenbosch campus, and are followed by Q&A with the director and producers Chris Thurman and Victor van Aswegen.

“With this project,” says van Aswegen, “We are bringing to life an astonishing 28 Shakespeare characters in 10 South African languages through 35 iconic monologues. But more than that: we are also presenting these characters reimagined as inhabitants of the modern-day world, speaking to us in a natural, colloquial, conversational style as contemporaries. And what they’re articulating are timeless human concerns. Transplanted to new and strikingly different contexts, these performances highlight multiple fresh nuances and variations on the familiar. But underlying all variety of history, culture, language and place, what shines through is a sense of hard unvarying human fundamentals being laid bare – movingly, pitch-perfectly, enlighteningly.”

The preview film screened at Woordfees features performances by celebrated actors Anelisa Phewa, Royston Stoffels, Chantal Stanfield and Buhle Ngaba, bringing to life in isiZulu, Afrikaans and Setswana four Shakespeare characters: Thomas More, John Falstaff, Mistress Page and Portia from the plays Sir Thomas More, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV Part II and Julius Caesar – the first time these characters, created by Shakespeare over four centuries ago, have been realised and presented on film in these languages. While the performance in Setswana draws from the near-century-old classic translation by Sol Plaatje dating from the 1930s, the other translations were created for the film – the isiZulu by actor Anelisa Phewa and the Afrikaans by director van Aswegen.

The Speak Me A Speech preview screenings at Woordfees are made possible by EasyEquities and supported by Business and Arts South Africa (BASA).

The five monologues in the preview film (Falstaff gets two) were selected for the wide range of topics, situations and emotions they cover. Old-age mischief-making for love and money, indignation at the receipt of an unwanted advance, and eloquent words on the manifold merits of sherry give us Shakespeare in light-hearted mode – in Afrikaans. A shift of tone takes us into the life and mind of a Setswana-speaking woman trapped in an unhappy marriage, and finally to an impassioned speech delivered by a Zulu leader to a violent, xenophobic mob.

As in the full-length film, the monologues in South African languages are punctuated by reflection in English on some of the material – in this case an extended sequence in which Anelisa Phewa shares some of the thinking underpinning his work on the translation and performance of the powerful speech by Thomas More.

All monologues filmed for the project are made publicly available on the web platform www.speak-me-a-speech.com, with user-selectable subtitle options (Shakespeare, the South African language being spoken, and the translation into contemporary English of the spoken language), and texts.

A Midsummer Night's Dream on tour

VR Theatrical’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Geoff Hyland, ran to much acclaim at the Maynardville Open-Air Theatre in Cape Town in February this year. Now the production is back by popular demand, and will be touring to Stellenbosch and Durban in October and November.

Spring in Stellenbosch means only one thing: the Toyota US Woordfees! In 2023, festival-goers will have the chance to watch A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Oude Libertas Amphitheatre from 9-13 October. Tickets via Quicket.

The production then moves to the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre on the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Howard College Campus in Durban, where it will run from 1-12 November. Tickets can be purchased via Computicket.

Schools in the area can arrange special rates - email alyssa@vrtheatrical.com for more information.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream welcomes three new cast members for this tour:

Sizwesandile Mnisi is an actor, singer, dancer, and writer who graduated from the University of Cape Town’s Drama School in 2015. He has since worked in both theatre and film, performing in Germany, Senegal, Scotland, the Royal Court in London, as well as New York and Washington DC. His South African theatre highlights include multi-award winning play The Fall and the role of Siya in Marc Lottering’s Aunty Merle - The Musical and Aunty Merle - It's A Girl.

Kylie Fisher is also a Theatre and Performance graduate from the University of Cape Town. Since her graduation in 2020, she has focused on film, debuting in Ridley Scott’s Raised by Wolves. She also starred in the Both Worlds series Recipes For Love and Murder and Showmax's Troukoors. Beyond her film work, Kylie teaches drama to children.

Caleb Swanepoel completes the UCT-trained trio. Alongside his film and stage acting career, Caleb is a keynote speaker, has represented South Africa in para-sport and worked in the tech industry. His most recent creative project is the short film And Yet, I Remain, which reflects on his experience of surviving a great white shark attack, where he lost his right leg, and his subsequent relationship with the ocean.

And finally: Maynardville fans will be pleased to know that it is now possible to book advance tickets for the 2024 production, Romeo and Juliet!

Play the Knave, Joburg: workshops for teachers

Gina Bloom (University of California, Davis) and Lauren Bates (Educasions) are no strangers to the Shakespeare ZA network! Bloom and Bates have been collaborating since 2020, developing resources, methods and materials to help South African high school teachers present Shakespeare’s plays to their learners.

Play the Knave is a digital theatre game developed by Bloom and her UC Davis colleagues. It provides a new way for students to encounter Shakespeare, getting them up on their feet to design and perform scenes using avatars in a Mixed Reality (MR) format.

Bloom and Bates have previously introduced Play the Knave and related classroom practices to teachers and learners in Cape Town. Now schools in Johannesburg have the opportunity to discover the world where Shakespeare and gaming technology meet!

Gina Bloom

Lauren Bates

Two teacher workshops will be held in August:

  • On Saturday 5 August at Christ Church Preparatory School and College in Midrand

  • On Saturday 12 August at the University of the Witwatersrand in Braamfontein

Both workshops will run from 9:00-12:00, followed by lunch.

Watch this BBC News video to see Play the Knave in action

Workshop participants will try out a Play the Knave lesson and discuss how it can be adapted for their own classroom use. Four lesson options explore violence in Shakespeare’s tragedies and in students’ own communities, focusing on Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello.

There will be free, ongoing support for workshop participants who wish to implement these lesson plans, including the equipment required.

CLICK ON ONE OF THE FLIERS BELOW TO REGISTER !

Keynotes: Shakespeare Towards An End

We are excited to share with the Shakespeare ZA community two brilliant video resources from the recent “Shakespeare Towards An End” conference. The event, co-hosted by the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa and the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre, was held at Spier Wine Farm from 24-27 May.

The keynote speakers were Ruben Espinosa (Arizona State University) and Jyotsna Singh (Michigan State University).

In his talk, “The Way To Dusty Death: Shakespeare and Tomorrow”, Espinosa interrogates how past uses of Shakespeare (all our yesterdays) have aligned him and his work with oppressive structures of power, before pointing to promising futures of Shakespeare through readings that underscore racial and other forms of justice and solidarity.

Singh’s talk, “Lyric Voices, Cultural Translations, and Dialogues across Time and Space: William Shakespeare and Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984)”, discusses Vishal Bhardwaj’s hit film Haider and considers, in particular, its use of the poetry of Faiz; she goes on to explore “lyric thinking”, both in the early modern period and in the present day.