Unusual Bones, in association with Kanya Viljoen, Qondiswa James, Theatre Arts Admin, The Drama Factory, Jan van Riebeeck High School, and City Bowl Park will present Eurydice – a local take on Sarah Ruhl’s text based on the Greek myth, Orpheus and Eurydice.
Eurydice will debut in an empty abandoned swimming pool in Cape Town city centre. The infamous myth is reimagined to focus on the journey of its heroine as the play deals with themes of love, loss, remembrance, and reminiscence. Sarah Ruhl’s internationally-acclaimed contemporary play, has been translated and adapted by Kanya Viljoen and Qondiswa James to sit within a South African context – translated into Afrikaaps, Afrikaans and isiXhosa.
The use of multiple languages creates a sense of the power dynamics experienced within these languages in South Africa. This multicultural and multilingual piece hopes to create a dialogue around young South Africans and the way we fall in and out of love with one another.
Living in Eurydice’s world
“I’ve always wanted to live in Eurydice’s world, one in which she becomes herself, more than an object for Orpheus’ story in the original myth, as we investigate her and sit with her hopes and desires. There’s a great deal of feminist work being done here, to decentralise the man’s story, and instead to find and give space for femme narratives, to give ourselves full lives in colour,” says Qondiswa James (pictured above).
“It’s been interesting finding how isiXhosa and Afrikaans move through the English of this text, how the poetics become layered in new and complex ways to guide us to richer meaning, or feeling. How this iteration deepens the poetics of forgetfulness, and asks questions about collective memory in a context of a disparate and segregated country and world,” she continues
The choice of staging the play in an empty swimming pool seeks to allow theatre to move away from passive viewership to active engagement with an experience. It invites an audience to a “pool party”, to a space where they themselves need to position, locate and engage with the performers as extensions of themselves. The focus moves from product to experimental process, and the bodies and identities that might otherwise be excluded from traditional contexts.
Background
Unusual Bones is a collective of creatives in Cape Town, that seeks to explore alternative and interdisciplinary ways of creating projects through a collaborative framework. The collective, founded by Kanya Viljoen and Emilie Badenhorst, seeks to question and explore the human spirit in South Africa. The vision of Unusual Bones. is to gently command a change in the social attitudes of South Africans through gutsy, honest, and excellent stories, amplifying the ‘othered’ voices in our local community. The collective carves out safe spaces for South African women to revive their creative expression in an industry that is often ruled by vertical hierarchies and ‘set methods’.
Kanya Viljoen graduated cum laude from the University of Cape Town with a specialisation in Theatre and Performance. Recently, Kanya completed her MA in Practice as Research as an Andrew W Mellon scholar and graduated with distinction. She is a founding member of Unusual Bones. Kanya has received awards, bursaries and nominations for her work as a writer, director and performer in both theatre and film.
Qondiswa James is a cultural worker living in Cape Town, South Africa. She is an award-winning theatre-maker, performance artist, film and theatre performer, installation artist, writer, arts facilitator and activist. Her work engages the socio-political imagination towards mobilising transgression.
What: Eurydice
Where and when: Cape Town High School (96 Hatfield St, Gardens, Cape Town) from 9 to 12 March 2022
Tickets: https://theatrearts.co.za/
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