Mandla and Crew Interview Unedited

8/8/2019 Mandla and Crew Interview Unedited

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Eds note: Highlighted text designates where the sound was unclear. Square

brackets are designate where I edited the text for clarity.

Wilton: Just to jump in the deep endRight in the beginning the idea of choking

on the words was like a trend throughout the playhow even the dead choke on

their own words, so I wonder how that translates into real life. Was that thepoint? Was that what you were trying to represent, how choking on the words

transcends everything.

Fudwa: Why did you create this play in a language other than English and was it

part of an experiement or experimental theatre?

Mandla: First of all the piece is a collective writing and all the cast members had

their part in the writing of it and second of all I co directed it with Fansiwa so

share the questions around (laughs). Im tempted not to answer your question

because I dont think you trust what you got from the play. But just simply that

its painful to tell stories. Its a metaphor, choking on the words. Its very hard[to tell stories] and because its so hard and painful we often dont tell these

stories or get an audience to listen to these stories. So its choking for me to tell

the stories, but its also choking you to listen to the stories. But if we run away

from that stage, it means we are lying because that story hasnt disappeared

and it will come back more painfully, so for me that exists in all the words.

Faniswa: Also its interesting how people carry their stories in their own bodies. If

you cant say what you need to, how does the body then speak? Because we

carry all our stories in our bodies.

Jenny: I think whats interesting in that metaphor, choking on the words is that

choking is a completely physical response to a supposedly verbal act, which is

also physical, so in a way its locating very strongly the fact that ones

experience around narration happens through the body. We experience stories in

our bodies and we attempt to narrate them through the body. So it tries to

breaks down the separation between text, which supposedly happens from this

part above the neck, and experience, which happens below that.

Mandla: I watched a documentary about this women who had been blind and

was getting an eye transplant and this psychologist was trying to get the lady to

understand the experience of seeing now after so many years of not being ableto see. He said that people are going to expect you to be able to tell stories

without opening your mouth now, so you are also expected to read stories. IN

most cases we communicate with strangers without opening our mouths. Most

communication takes place through gesture. The body is always telling stories

even if we try to hide it. So I can tell you al lot of stories about yourselves

(laughs).

Why did I choose the language isiXhosa? Firstly, its for a political reason, to be

honest

Jenny:Ive been asked this question before, Why are you making theatre in

isisXhosa? and I;m saying, Why are you asking the question? Why do we


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assume that theatre has to be in English, maybe Afrikaans? What have we

learned about how we have to express ourselves such that we think it has to be

in a particular language?

Mandla: When someone asks me why didnt I translate it, why didnt I use

subtitles, I say, because I didnt have to

Fudwa:When watching it one didnt really need to read the subtitles in order to

understand what was going on because everything from the lighting, to the

music to the expression translated the story already. A lot of the time one didnt

need to understand the language in order to translate the story.

Mandla: But I think the question is bigger than that. Its about our general mind

set when it comes to language in theatre. Even Xhosa speakers, when they come

to see a Xhosa play, they are shocked. That is one of the wounds in the stars of

Apartheid. And its interesting that whenever we try to analyze theatre we do so

through the Western frame-set. And then we give it names because of thedifferent language and the difference in how its done. We say, maybe its

experimental theatre, maybe its Brecht, maybe its very fairytale-like, no,

maybe its very realistic. Were always using that framework and so we forget

where we got that framework and we forget our own means and modes of

performances and ways we communicate stories and then when we start re-

incorporating those things people say, oh there was lots of music so it must be a

musical.

And it takes time [to shift ones analytical framework]. I remember a long time

ago at UCT we went to Rondebosch because it was Valentines day and wewent to buy a Valentines card, and as we were walking through the aisles, a

friend of ours was on the other side of the aisle and he started laughing

hysterically and we wondered what was going on and he told us to come look,

and what he was laughing at was a Valentines card written in isisXhosa. Its an

example of the condition we are in, where we undermine our own language. But

the language can actually express and speak in volumes.

Faniswa: And also in a company level we have different routes. We work a lot

with routes in the company. We have the N2 route which is the Xhosa

productions, we have the N7 route which is the Afrikaans productions, and we

have the Cape to Cairo route where we could be any language from French, to

English to isiXhosa, to Swahili.

Mandla: And members of the company are also very attached to the university of

Cape Town and when we create a production it is also attached to our own

research and what were researching about. And when we talk about the N2 my

research was about the route from Cape Town to the Eastern Cape and this

constant movement and asking the question about home and what constitutes

ones idea about home and who decides what home is and why there is this

constant movement. People have seen Incwaba lento which is more of a follow-

up, which looks at these N2 stories and what those stories are about.


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Meg: What struck me as really interesting was I was remembering Toni Morrison

talking about trying to write about ghosts in Beloved but when she was trying to

write Beloveds voice it was difficult because theres this very abstract world

which one cannot access because how do we give language to the dead? And

why I really enjoyed the physicality of your theatre is because if the piece

belongs to any world it belongs to the world of the body and the lack of a body,

and I was looking at the translation and to a logical mind the English didnt work

out completely, and its actually appropriate, and I imagine the same goes for

the Xhosa, where the language didnt always make perfect sense, and so it

shouldnt because the language of the living and the language of the dead are

different [and so there is an interface problem of how these different languages

interact with one another]. And thats part of the anguish, which I think you

captured really well, through the physicality, and the translation that wasnt

really a translation and all the other confusions, which I thought were really

superb.

Jenny: I think whats interesting about the language of dance and the language

of physicality is that it allows for a particular kind of vertical drop into the

landscape of the story, because text tends to push a narrative, and it can also

not push, as in poetry

Mandla: I think in this case, it is trying to work hand in hand with the language

Jenny: I think it allows moments to descend quite deeply into the emotional

landscape of the story, as opposed to the charge of the narrative which pushes

from beginning to end.

Mandla: In terms of the spoken word itself, its very idiomatic, very metaphorical,

and you dont speak that kind of isiXhosa in everyday life. Because I always

believe that there are emotional depths that one cant express in any other

language except in the metaphors for that which one aims to express, and so for

me that opens up the meaning in such a way that transcends the realm of the

story that were telling here in this play. It makes it bigger. Im always aiming to

make a theatre which doesnt enable the audience to respond so instantly to the

story, [i.e. that there are ambiguities in how one interprets the story] because for

me, an instant comprehension is always a bit fake, where theres this definitive

narrative structure which has a designated beginning, middle and end. You cango home and just easily write an essay about it. But Im looking for images,

something thats more physical, and also for something to say that can crawl

underneath ones skinat night, or even in two years time. Ben Ochres speaks

a lot about those kind of story tellers, those magicians on stage that create this

other world.

Meg: Tony Morrison, when talking about trying to find the voice of the ghost was

saying how the voice is completely metaphorical and figurative, you actually

couldnt cross it at all, which was really haunting because youre trying to find a

rational explanation and actually you cant. So I felt that worked extremely well

in your production.


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Lillian: Speaking of the haunting aspect of it, when I came in the lady that was

standing over there did kind of freak me out, it was so realistic, so my question

for al the actors on stage is, how do you disconnect yourself from the audience

and stay in character and basically push the boundaries and limits of acting? Is it

difficult or does it comes with any ease?

Faniswa: It should never come with ease. It should never ever come with ease. A

comfortable actor on stage is a dangerous thing, thats what I believe. It comes

during the rehearsal process where one is researching about the characters one

is playing and you know that hitch-hiking story about that girl on the road? Well I

think everyone has heard that story about the girl on the road and everyone tells

it like they were told it by their best friend but no one ever mentions who the

best friend is (laughs). But its such a universal storySomewhere around the

world, theres a hitchhiker. Stories are important and I believe that as an actor,

when you decide to tell a story which s not necessarily your story, but is

someone elses story, when you get on stage, its not about me. Its about thatstory. Thats so important so the only way to do that is to be truthful and tell it

with as much integrity as you can. But the minute I get on stage with [my own

attitude about the story] that means Im not giving the story its on dignity.

Hope: I just want to know the inspiration behind the play and when I walked in

and I saw her hitchhiking and the cars and there was a car crash I thought it was

maybe one of those typical [spook] stories where somebody dies on the road

where there was no cleansing ceremony, and because there was no cleansing

ceremony that persons [spirit] will stay n the road and cause other cars to crash

and I was thinking at first, that it might be that kind of story, so Im curious to

know what the inspiration behind the play was.

Faniswa: It was actually one of those stories you just told. Thats the honest

truth.

Jenny: I think Mandla already mentioned it, that this piece was sort of a sequel to

Incwaba, which is basically a story of a community that gets broken up through

migrant labour through the imperative to search for work away from the rural

communities of the Eastern Cape. And the father goes off to work and disappears

and the way I see it this piece starts to look at or begins to answer some of the

questions about what happened to him.

Mandla: It also looks at the frustration of the untold stories. Where we perform

rituals for our disappeared loved ones differently, and the frustration of not

having that chapter or that story closed. So even in the work that we dont see, it

is part of us. We as human beings, we the living cannot rest until those stories

have been told. We can hear those stories as symbols and as signs, but as black

people we know that if experience is not collected we wont rest. We know these

stories of our grandfathers when they say they are cold because they have been

buried in a different place, where it is not home for them. Jenny was saying that

in Incwaba we were looking at the importance of home, the importance of

belonging, the importance of traditional connection and all these notions of inter-connectedness but also not divorcing it from the ancestors [] What happened


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to those people who started their journey and never got there? When they leave

and then we dont know what happened? What is important when telling the

story? And I think what is important is ot tell those stories and it is through

rituals that we clothethe story. There is also a national thief here when we talk

about the wound. There was a national agenda when Mandela came to power.

He spoke a lot about the rainbow nation. And because we loved it we didnt

want to unbandage those wounds and in most cases those wounds were

unattended. They were not cleaned, they didnt put ointment and if you look at it

now, in the day, in South Africa, that wound, that bandage is leaking. And it is

time for the country to unbandage and to deal with the pain. TRC was a gesture

but it never went down to the grassroots level. So its time for us to tell those

stories. In Zimbabwe it was part of the national agenda as well. All families, they

were actually encouraged to go to the bush to collect, the spirit of their brothers,

of their sisters of their fathers who died during those guerrilla warfares. Thats

important and we cannot cut corners. You cannot force healing.

Lonwabo: My question is for the actors. How are the characters assigned to

them? Do they chose the character because they know that they want to tell the

story? What motivates them to be that good on stage when theyre acting in

character?

Cast Member (Asandigla): When we started the production, the director would

give us tasks to tell our own story about something that happened. It could be

personal or a story that you heard, but in most cases, the characters we choose

to play are the characters that are close to us, so maybe thats why we play

them so well, they are characters [that we know intimately] because we see

them everyday and they are characters that we relate to.

Neo: I think there are a lot of tensions that inform the part of your wounds as the

character and I feel like I didnt understand all the parts of the character. Ive got

a blank. I sort of understand that you were the assistant to the healer and I want

to know about your wound, the characters wound.

Mandla: Can anyone from the audience answer?

Meg: I think that he was supposed to be married and his wife never appeared

and so theres this terrible sense of longing for a lost love so I think that was his

wound. But in the end he eventually, after he dresses up as the other lady as,

which is on the verge of complete madness he suddenly comes to peace with her

and he can let it go and he feels totally liberated afterwards.

Sisanda: When I came in when the play started, somehow I only thought it was

about the stories she was talking about. Only when I saw the translations, Phalo,

and Sobukwe, it came to me that there was much more to the story. So I want

to know what are challenges when putting together [one cohesive story which is

comprised of a whole lot of individual stories]? And it was also politically inclined,

so I want to know how [that threaded its way through the individual stories to

make one whole story]?


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Mandla: Its painful. The week doesnt end without me saying, Im over this. Im

goingBecause I grow up in a culture where people dont go for scripts, Ive

worked with people through workshops and Ive seen them struggle in trying to

put pieces together and fortunately the same people Ive workshopped with are

the same people in the company. I worked with them at UCT and Mark

Fleishman and when making theatre with a group, you allow a sense of

ownership among a group but also you allow other voices to influence you. Its

not always easy, its difficult. People who say that artists are starters they are

easier to work with because they negotiate with the wood and the hammer. Its

fine if youre a director and you just give the actors the script, but if you ask

them to tell their own stories, then they definitely want their stories to be part of

the end product. Its a constant negotiation. Its also a question of trusting the

cast members, that its allowed to come to the lesson space not knowing what

youre going to do. They are so fragmented and they are so important and so its

difficult knowing how to narrate the journey. A lecturer friend of mine once asked

me, do you know what makes a fruit salad a fruit salad? I said Fruit? And he saidno, what makes the fruit salad is the container. And what makes a play [thats

built up from several different parts is that frame] something that will hold

everything together. You need a spine. And creating this spine is difficult. And

this spine is the wound. And we need to keep asking ourselves, what is her

wound? And you need tramwork because sometimes when youre so close to the

work you tend to [get carried away on one track]. And one thing I do is work very

closely with the title. So I always come up with a title before I even know what

the story is going to be.

Tarryn: I wan to know what the significance of the blankets is? I noticed therewas a blanket folded up on the trolley but the assistant didnt use it. Is it linked

to the perception of the ghosts looking like white sheets?

Jenny: The blankets were in the rehearsal room (laughs). And they provided

oppurtunities, one to break up the space and define the space differently, so we

started playing with them and secondly, they seem to be connected to images of

comfort and wrapping, in terms of sleep and relating to death. So they started to

become more evocative; the spirits came out of them around them. So to me

they spoke to the notion of embalmment, of wrapping bodies, preparing bodies

for death, but also the comfort of sleep.

Faniswa: Like the mourners in our tradition, when someone has died in the

family, you need to have a blanket, you just sit on the mattress and you each

have a blanket when boys go for initiation, [so it also symbolizes various rituals].

Mandla: You also talk about blankets in the disaster relief things. But theres also

something about a particular kind of blanket as a disaster-relief thing. And there

are pep store blankets you can get for R10,50, and in prison, so its the cheapest

blanket that gets used for different purposes. And theres just something about

blankets and accidents because they are shaking and theyre cold and theres

something about people sitting with these blankets wrapped aroundthat image

itself [is powerful].


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Lukas: First of all the singing was just awesome. I just wanted to know if the

songs were traditional songs or if you had written them? And were the songs in

Xhosa because I didnt hear any clicks in it?

Singer: IN the beginning we had music classes where we were taught how to sue

our voice and compose a song so Mandla the director gave the music teacher thename of the production and we had to work around that so we composed the

songs ourselves.

Mandla: What happens is some of the songs we use because we know the

audience has some way of relating to them, like for instance there is a church

song, so its a combination of songs we gave to the musical director and we

asked the cast members to come with songs that spoke to them, so I aks them to

go look for a song that invokes spirituality in you, or a song that evokes warmth.

And the musical director would find a way of recreating the essence of that song

for stage, and some of the songs we hear them just as they are, like the church

song. And Xhosa speakers can easily pick up th melody and the harmony and so

the audience will engage and relate to the song, because those particular

traditional songs are recognizable .

Faniswa: Also theres a way that old traditional songs are sung. They almost

sound like a calling and it has the same intonation.

Mandla: We have all heard tula mama, tula, tula, but they way that we sang it

had to mean more than just the one we all recognize. The question is how dowe

find newness and freshness in things that are already popular. The same goes

with storytelling. Story tellers tell the same story, but the story teller will alwaysre-invent it somehow, [so that each story will always be idiosybcratic]. We know

what the story is, but we will always be enticed by how it is retold. So thats what

we want to do, is have people recognize the work, but also make it fresh and

new.

Jerome: For Jenny I want to know are you given a story and then just told to add

movements or do you have any input to the story itself? I also want to know how

much of your training in Paris did you incorporate into the show, like your

clowning from Josh de coch?

Aidan: I just want to ask where you got that barrier from because I want one.More importantly, whats the role of the void over there and how does it link up

with the symbolism of the road? Because I found that and the images on there

quite interesting.

Astrid: I think as an audience, everyone has a specific part that meant something

to them, mine was just the small part where the girl when I came in put her

thumb in her mouth, and she was hitchhiking with it too, I just wanted to know

what the symbolic meaning was behind that. Also the symbolism of the hands

coming through that white area there.

?: I also wanted to ask about the thing at the back there, because there were

eyes over there and lips like someone looking over, and I also wanted to know


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about the healers wound because it seemed like she was helping everybody

else but then the tata says So I want to know, whats her wound?

Wilton: I want to know about the idea about peel it off obviously it was a trend

throughout the play and you spoke about it a little bit earlier. Not only to peel off

the wound, to me it also stood for, to move away from whats holding you backyou have to strip yourself physically, emotionally, completely. Was that the

idea? As an aspiring creative writer I need to understand from different

perspectives, how does one take oneself out of your own body and exist in the

mind of another? Because thats what Im struggling with.

Jenny: Just in terms of my training Jacque le coque doesnt just teach clowning,

basically when I speak about my training there I always say that he gave me the

gift of myself. By that I mean he pointed me to my own body, for one thing and

my own narratives as a source of making theatre, which partially answers your

question about how does one see things from different perspectives. I see things

from different perspectives by going deeply into my own. One thinks one has to

make theatre by jumping out, but actually ones makes theatre by jumping in,

very very deeply. So the gift that Jacque le coque gives is this notion of individual

narratives as being the source of theatre. But more than that he teaches teatre

dmovementwhich is theatre of movement so he says everything moves, tout

bouge, and the body is always expressive. The body is always telling a story. It

could be a little surface story, or it could be a much more subterranean story

where the language is more abstract. Then the interesting thing about bringing

that pedagogy into South Africa, is that the body, and in particular this piece, the

body is the site where a violent action happens. Violence isnt an abstract notion

that happens out there, it happens to the body and it is also through

understanding that that one can potentially find a place of healing around the

body; to explore how the body might resist that complete annihilation that

happens through violence. So here, whats happening with the language of the

bodies in the space is that theyve all been victims of the ultimate violence which

is mortality, so theyve all been erased. But in order for them to resist that

erasure they have to move in the space. So theres an empty space, where

nothing happens, where I have been erased, then theres the body that moves in

the space, that insists on its own individual, specific narrative moving through

the space.

So in terms of what Mandla told me to do with this piece, I had to wait quite a

while because they were struggling with the different bits. Im kind of like a

midwife, so I watch and listen to see what kind of thread theyre trying to pull

out. I have strong feelings as well which I try to come in with but I do a lot of

listening in terms of trying to find images and ways to make clear what it is

theyre thinking, and using language to pull out those threads.

Faniswa: About the set, ideally we would like to have a whole long road and have

people coming out from the ground, but theatrically, its not possible. We just

dont have the budget. So the screen is -


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Mandla: - the dead seams. One day I want Faniswa to be underneath there,

buried under the soil, so when the audience comes in, you just see this [limb

sticking out]

Faniswa: I think the screen is like an extension of the road but also its a way of

translation and bringing images, because we [wanted] to have the images on thefloor but because we have actors on the stage, and lighting wise it doesnt work.

Mandla: What does it look like? (to audience)

Audience: It looks like a gateway. Like cow skin,

Cast member: The thumb becomes a substitute for when the mother is not there.

And for my character, her mother died along the road, so my thumb sucking is

for me trying to comfort myself and using the same thing for hiking because its

the only thing I can do.

Faniswa: the healers wound is the fact that she didnt actually have time to take

care of her own wounds because all the other peoples stories kept coming.

Mandla and Crew Interview Unedited

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