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This world oceans day, Empatheatre is delighted to be celebrating...
This world oceans day, Empatheatre is delighted to be celebrating our new Animation Project which aims to educate South Africans and the world around the cultural and spiritual significance of the oceans from the South African Context. We are putting on the finishing touches of the animation entitled "Indlela Yokuphila". Which is isiZulu for “the soul’s journey”.
In this transdisciplinary and trans-epistemological project, artists, traditional healers, marine sociologists and deep sea marine ecologists have come together to collaborate on a more holistic biocultural alternative to ocean mapping and decision making. In the isiZulu traditional ancestral belief, the deep sea is the resting place of our ancestors, and after death the soul travels from the land, through streams, rivers, estuaries and eventually into the sea. In our main narrator character uGogo's words from the script:
"When you die, the rain compresses your body into crystals and squeezes out your soul, until you are born into the dreaming world, where you swim in the isihlanjana, the small streams - you become a young ancestor, bantu nohlanjana. As a young ancestor - idlozi elisalincane – you hear the song of the river of life –and you remember the personality of that place. Down-stream you swim, following the song of your great-great-grandmothers, who call you from the deep sea, ulwandle olujulile. You flow down the umlambo/ river (umfula) and grow older, remembering. You become Bantu Nomfula, a person of the river.... You swim deeper and deeper, following the songs of oGogo abadala. When you get to the source of the song, you find very old dark women who live there. When you first arrive, they are waiting to receive you – with the deepest love. They will know exactly whose child you belong to."
This journey was explained during an oral history that Empatheatre co-director and founder Mpume Mthombeni held with a traditional Zulu historian for the One Ocean Hub research project on transformative ocean governance in South Africa. The animation offers an expansive contribution to dialogue around mapping the ocean that includes and prioritizes cultural heritage narratives, as well as enabling new dialogue to emerge around how scientific and indigenous knowledge systems and their inter-related concerns can shift the ways in which ocean decision making is undertaken. Indela is being collaboratively developed with talented and visionary animator/director Marc Moynihan and Empatheatre co-director Dylan McGarry. Composer Braam Du Toit has created an original score for the production, which feels like a mini opera.
Mpume Mthombeni narrates this story, which carefully honours the original telling and has been involved in guiding every step of the production, as well as the original historian and traditional healer involved in the early telling. Dylan McGarry adapted the story for screen, into a short script, and careful 'call and response' research has been undertaken around the ethics of representation with the original knowledge holders, and other Nguni spiritual practitioners, to ensure the animation is honouring the mystical knowledge of the marine world as the realm of the ancestors.
We will be launching the final film closer to the end of this year 2021. However we will be doing early screenings of the second animatic with research partners and other knowledge holders to ensure the animation is able to meaningfully represent and honour this extraordinary story gifted to us.
Empatheatre with support from the Bertha House, is excited to be hosting a screening and post-film discussion around Complicite’s film Can I Live? at the Bertha House cinema in Cape Town on the 12th of October from 16:00 - 19:30.
Empatheatre and Mbazwana Creative Arts (MCA)in association with Amehlo Productions are proud to present a short documentary film centring on the devising of their acclaimed musical theatrical production Umkhosi Wenala .
How do we make sense of the violent histories that mark our past? This play, Isidlamlilo, forces us to engage seriously with this question. Depending on your own relationship with our violent history, this play awakens a profound and at times unsettling realization that history is a living breathing force in all our lives. Isidlamlilo is set in the dying days of Apartheid, and in the present democratic South Africa.