 Y cwm yw'r dyfodol ar ôl yn y dweud, ac mae'n gobeithio'n gweithio... oh, ychydig! Felly, rydyn! Mae chefnwys yn ei gweithio, ond mae'n gobeithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Felly, rydyn ni'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gwahanol. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'n meddwl o'r hwn, amddangosol, yn cyd-fτανol i'r hyn sydd i'r hyn beth sydd wedi'u gwahanol a oedd y tufnwys gรwyffydd yma o gwsgol. Mae'n meddwl i'r hyn, a dyma sy'n bod hefyd yn sgwpethiaidau, ac nad yw'r un o'n cyd-dweud o hyn mewn a yw bod yn ydychyn i mi. He'd be pitching about a piece on the Cheboyt girls... ...and I'm sure that everybody's heard about their particular tragedy... ...but it was one in which the world responded to and there was the hashtag, bring back our girls... ...and he's had the amazing idea of producing a piece of theatre on this topic, the Che causa girls... ...and his company's called Renegades Theatre. Hi. Hello. Hi. Hi. Good morning. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, Wale. Can you see us? No, not at all. I wish I could. All right. But you can hear us loud and clear. Very clearly. Excellent. So this is Pace. So my name is Fumi Adewale, and I am just hosting this section, and you know Jitni Kejona and Ricardo Peach, who are co-directors of Pace. So we have an auditorium full of people here today to listen to your pitch on the Chibok girls. Okay. So please tell us about this idea and how it came about and anything more that you feel we should know. All right. There hasn't been much told about the story of the abduction of the girls from the north eastern part of Nigeria. They hadn't been before I wrote the Chibok girls, and I felt it was important to chronicle an event that caught the world by surprise. You know, we're used to one person being taken or at least here. You hear the occasional story of someone being abducted, but when a group goes into a school and takes 200-plus students, anyway, it caused a lot of noise around the world. And so I decided to write on it. I used testimony from three of the girls that escaped Boko Haram. They were taken, those girls, Hawa and Mary, there were two Mary's. They were taken by Boko Haram. One jumped off the truck on the way to Sambisa, and two others escaped from Sambisa forest itself. And so I was brought in touch with them by an organisation on the northeast. It's run by a family, the Gadzamas, and so I began to write a story based on their personal testimonies of what happened. I also talked to people who had been involved in the rehabilitation of the girls after they were released by Boko Haram or they escaped or however they left that camp. So I wrote, and then I had to find some money to put the performance up, and the delegation of the European Union to Nigeria gave me a little bit of money. And so I was able to put it up, I was able to put up the premier at the Mison Centre here in Lagos with those three girls on stage, along professional actors. That was the first time. And I got a death rate after, I assume from Boko Haram. And then the following year, that was December 2015. You must understand that it's not a performance that can be put up easily in Nigeria itself. It attracts the attention of government, it attracts the attention of the abductors. No one really wants the story told. Either from the point of embarrassment or, I don't know, nobody wants the story told here. So I took, so we went to Rwanda to the Ubunu Festival run by Hopazeda, and we put it up there as well. In that instance, we didn't have the girls. It became very difficult to have those girls follow us around. But the production remains the same. It has three professional actors. It has a stage manager, it has a director and writer. That's me. And it has a drummer. It's written in the form of, they're almost like monologues. So each one is a story completing itself, even though the actors interact with each other. Each one is a story. It can be lasts anywhere from, it could last one and a half hours, it could last 30 minutes. It can be excised, it can be put together, it can be excised or reduced depending on what you want. But it's a small sized cast. It's also a story that must be told because it shows the, it shows the, there's a shift in the paradigm. People automatically assume that when people are abducted here, when communities are ravaged, when communities are ravaged and when people are taken away, they assume it's usually for, the primary purpose is for slavery or sex. But actually this abductors use it as a tool for, it's an economic tool as well. Because it arouses the sentiments of people, it puts pressure on the government. And they're forced to hand over money to those people. So the battlefront has changed actually. The way the wage war is more sophisticated now. Anyway, the Chibok girls chronicles a terrible period, a terrible period here. There have been other girls taken after and the flyer of the Chibok girls says the kid naps didn't start with Chibok. We just, the whole world heard about those kid naps through Chibok, but they didn't start with Chibok and they haven't ended yet. So yeah, that's my story. Thank you. Thank you. Could you tell us a bit about what you want to do next with the production? Are you aiming to develop it further, tore it? Can you give us a bit of information on your next plans? I'd like to show you to the world. I'd like the world to see and to understand the helplessness of people here. I'm Nigerian. For me the very idea that girls could be taken from school could be assured that we're going to be safe could be abandoned by the military in school on the day the Boko Haram fighters came. The very idea for me was, I didn't understand it, I couldn't wrap my head around it for a while and it took me talking to many people, people who had worked in those places for me to understand, for me to actually finally grasp it. It took me meeting those girls, it took them being on my stage and then being able to point out their classmates and the iconic photographs of girls wearing hijabs, being made to wear hijabs and accepting the new faith and the new calling. So I'd like the world to understand this, I'd like the world to understand the aftermath of this kidnaps. The aftermath of the kidnaps is we have children and this thing is not about a Christian or Muslim thing, that's not what it's about here. Boko Haram is an equal opportunity killer, they take everyone out and now after communities were ravaged here, the people abandoned their children or they had died and children were left lying in the dust or just crying there and Christians would pick up Muslim children and things that are wrong with them to save them. Now some of these children ended up in IDP camps, camps for internally displaced people and some of these children were sold. This isn't a very, how do you say, it doesn't pay in the country in a good light but there were things that, there was a fallout of what Boko Haram did or what Boko Haram continues to do. Some of these children were sold, they were sold off to strangers by people who were meant to be taking care of them in camps. So a brother and sister, some 12-year-old girl, an 80-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy are sold off to strangers who travel hundreds of kilometers and they are deleted off the database of a camp with a click. They're gone forever, no one ever knows, you don't know the purpose of the word. There are too many sides to it. There's the military side here and all this is told in the story. There's a military side here, the reason some of the soldiers, our soldiers refuse to go into the Sambisa Forest. The Sambisa Forest is 67 times the size of New York City. There's no money in it. It's much more bigger than London City, it's much bigger than Lagos and its waterways and all its creeks and everything. It spans countryside. I just like people to know everywhere in the world, it doesn't matter where. I'd like people to understand a terrible period. Boko Haram is rated, its impact on communities is rated, its negative impact is rated the highest in the world now. You know, even though it receives finances from other, in quote, bigger organisations outside. One of the reasons, one of the reasons I couldn't be at pace actually is, I think, is pressure in quote, over this plane, over this performance. We were followed through Rwanda and this time it was by security operatives here. You know, every time you say, I'm going to do the Chibogald, people are looking and thinking, you know, what are you telling, what angle have you put to it, you know, how does the wall receive it, it's just where we are. So I'd like the wall to see, that's what that's, excuse the rambling. No, it was interesting and very thoughtful ramble. Thank you. You said something about that the story is part of a continuing set of circumstances. In that case, does the story shift from different stages, do you update it? Is there change depending on what new information emerges or is it a fixed story to the story of the three girls? There are, the three girls speak for everyone who's been taken. They speak about the betrayal by the authorities. I used betrayal because they were assured they'd be safe in the school, by the principal of the school, and they thought they'd be safe because there were government forces, there was a military in Chibog when the thing happened. So yes, it keeps slightly, there are modifications to match what's happening, it's slightly fluid, there are modifications, some of these girls have become Boko Haram operatives themselves. Some of these girls have become Boko Haram operatives. Some have the Stockholm syndrome, some have killed on behalf of Boko Haram too. Some have fallen in love with the leftenance of Boko Haram with the soldiers of Boko Haram. And so yes, so it keeps changing. Some of those girls, I have a story of a girl in the play, of a girl whose seaside bomb didn't go off. She was a school girl, but then she was changed, so to say. Her seaside bomb didn't go off, and she ran to a hospital because she had blood on her and all that, and that's when they discovered that she was wearing a seaside vest, explosives on herself. And so yes, when we hear things like that, when I hear things like that, those things are dead to the story, they are dead to the story. And there are no girls seated, I must say this, there are no girls seated in some room waiting to be rescued right now. There's no room where you have the rest of the Chibow girls. They're gone, they're scattered, they're dispersed like the wind. And that's another side, that's another element of our conspiracy here. There's no where, where they are right now, where you say they're in a room in South Africa and they're listening to the government and how the government is going to rescue them. They're gone, they're gone, it doesn't matter what the government says there. So these things are, these things influence the evolution of this play. My last question is, you talk about being followed around by operatives, you've received a death threat, you believe that your visa was denied because of the subject matter of this play. Not tonight, it was just made, it was just made, it was just made tough to receive. It was tough to receive. The procedure was, the procedure was, became convoluted. That's a good way of putting it. What kind of network do you think you would need to be able to take this work forward? Have you considered that maybe you need a different kind of infrastructure due to the nature of this play? You spoke about a particular union coming to Nigeria and giving you some, a small amount of funding to start it off, are there other organisations around that you think would also be supportive and maybe we could consider stakeholders in terms of this story that you're trying to, have you thought about it in that, in those terms? If there are stakeholders I don't know them, I don't know them, I don't, I don't, I had a Nobel laureate, Professor Wolishio Inka, come to see the premier of this production and he, when I spoke to him about pace and the issues I was having to get into South Africa, he told me how important it was that the story, this was, this was Sunday, this was six years ago, he wrote me to tell me how important it was that we, we continued to tell the story, but I don't, I don't have the, I'm a, I'm a playwright and a director, I don't have the, the infrastructure, the money that I was given by the delegation of the European Union wouldn't have bought costumes for European production, you understand, so really there's nothing I can do by myself. The idea, I wouldn't, I wouldn't put up the Chibogulls in Nigeria now, I wouldn't put up the Chibogulls in Nigeria now. I've been woken by phone calls, I've had, I mean I've had people fly out of the country with me to, to neighboring African countries. It would be, the, the, what, what, what I, I would appreciate maybe a network of theatres saying you know we can do this, we can do this, we can support this, we can put this up, but back here it's quite difficult. I don't have the network personally myself, I really appreciate what Nicker did and Pace, you know, believing that the Chibogulls would work well and would work well in Pace in South Africa. I wish you have enable to bring it there. Well thank you very much for your contribution. You've given us a lot of thought, a food for thought. Somebody this morning here talked about a combination of journalism and theatre and the idea of verbatim theatres seems to be coming back quite strongly in Africa today because the contemporary stories are also very important to talk about, so thanks very much. Thank you. Can we give Wale a round of applause? Thank you. Wale, we're going to ask the audience for questions, so please hold on. Does anybody have questions for the director of Chibogulls? My question is, I don't know how to put the question, the play itself is quite exciting and interesting. Would you give it to someone else in another country so that they perform it there, so that there are no links with people in Nigeria to avoid the death threats? For example, if someone says here we've got a group, we'd love to perform that play here. Tell the same story, is that an option? We would give it thought. As a production company we would like to perform the play ourselves in as many places as we could. But we would give that thought as well, depending on where it was. Depending on where it was. I got an offer, when we took it to Rwanda, I got an offer from an American who said he wanted the script. But we want to take it to America too, and we hope to be at a global performance of a festival of global performances next year. So we would like to take it to as many places as we can. Basically, my name is already on a file anyway, so it doesn't matter anymore where we take it to. Am I not able to do it here, where we can do it anywhere? Now, if it's on account of cost or something, we might say okay, we can't take it to Uzbekistan, on account of the fact that the guys there say they can't fly us in or anything. So I suppose it will be subjective, it will depend on each place. But the actors themselves, and the main actors, there have been two that have been consistent out of the three females. One had to drop out for our work reasons. They are invested in these as I am basically. So yes, we would like to take it as many places as we can ourselves. We would like to be there, so to say. Thank you. Any other questions? The idea that the gentleman here put forward is quite interesting. I remember when vagina monologs was being disseminated. It might be a case of the director or the actresses also going to countries running workshops and doing the performance there with the cast on the ground. That might be another way of disseminating yourself and the two actresses I involved could also become roving directors of the people. Yes, that makes, that will be walkable I think. For example, there are nuances to this thing. For example, we've been asked to come to Canada with this performance next year. But you know, there was a suggestion that we do this play. Not only in English, but in Yrbae as well. Yrbae is the main language of the southwestern part of Nigeria. But as I explained to them, even though it would have meant more, a longer stay and you know, more productions, you can't do the Chibok girls in Yrbae. Because it's not a play about Yrbae land. It's about the north eastern part of Nigeria. So the nuances have to be true for it to stay, for it to be genuine. You understand what I'm saying? Which is the reason it would be good to have maybe the director there or a couple of the actors there helping out with some of those things, instead of flying in blind. There's another question, please hold on. Okay. I'm just wondering, have you thought about using other mediums to spread the story? So like film or just like film? Yeah. Are you are you thinking about other ways of spreading? Yes, I am actually. Yes, I am actually. I've thought of film and I've thought of even publishing as a book. But like I said, sometimes you need contacts in those places. You need people who actually are authorities in filmmaking, proper cinematographers. Yes, I have. If I had the opportunity, it would be a great thing to do that with it as well, to continue with it this way. It seems that's the last of our questions. So thank you very much for joining us this morning. Thank you very much. The next group up is amazing, wonderful always bubbly, incredibly vivacious, Siam, from the Domingo effect. Siam will be pitching the real fun hip-hop. Thank you for that loaded introduction. What I'm going to do, firstly thank you Pace, thank you Nica, Ricardo and the entire team Rhea for this opportunity. What I have done is I've taken our long production and just chopped it. So what you're going to see is very chopped into 10 minutes and then we can chat for the next 10 minutes. So I'm going to ask, did you go? Thanks. I feel what you're going to do. Check it out. Can you introduce yourself more and tell us a bit about the production? My name is Siam Domingo. I produced and conceptualised the real fun hip-hop and it came at a time when I was being asked to choose to be one thing, to represent one thing and go like, you're vocal about things, you need to stand up for us and I went, who are us, what is us. And then at the same time this opportunity came because I get excited about real dance because it's what I knew at the time is the oldest dance, recorded dance form on the ground in Cape Town. And what was magical for me about real dance that it wasn't just a traditional dance as done by the fire, there was a fusion in what it was but we perceived it to be the brown people's dance but it had a lot of Irish influence in it in terms of the formation and the costumes that they wear. So to me that was already something that was mixed and then when we started with the production I wanted to mix as many things as possible and as I see it now it's still so siloed, it speaks to one group of people though or one denomination in this country and what I want to see happen to it is through fusing like we've done in this production all kinds of sounds so it starts with the basic bow which is again what we knew of as the oldest recorded sound and then we bring in as many of the modern things that we can so the DJ's desk gets cabled like the guitar and other instruments they play as a band they play equal the same with the dancers so yeah that's it so we tried to fuse as much and now what I the reason I'm wanting to pitch is to fuse it further to start linking South Africa properly and linking us to Africa because we're on the same continent but we're worlds apart we dream about going to America first and London and New York which is phenomenal but we're not connected with people on the same continent as we are so yeah that's the dream for the work. You talked about the fusion of dance forms and we saw is that the traditional Cape Town dance form? It's not just traditional to Cape Town but it lives in a lot of the smaller towns like farming and in the Burlant and those kinds of areas are in and out mainly outside of Cape Town because Cape Town has become a city so it's the traditional dance form that still lives as entertainment in those areas where not much else is happening in terms of holding tradition and art together. I also saw examples of some visual artists creating visual art on stage as well. How does that link in with the dancing and other elements? So a lot of for me about the real funny pop was the real funny pop means the rules of hip hop and the rules of hip hop are knowledge of self. The ones that I know and that resonates with me is it's knowledge of self and it's collaborating creatively and that's what we've done and then visually as well so what we did was the visual artist you see at the beginning he starts that artwork and it finishes it while the production is running for the rest of the hour inspired by what his feeling happened on stage so then we bring in the graffiti elements of expression. It seems very interesting that you've taken a hip hop philosophy and used it as a framework to bring together a lot of diverse elements from South Africa. Yeah my own background is that my heartbeat is I'm a musical theatre girl that like I previously couldn't listen to hip hop until I started working in communities and wanting to so like the kids you saw yesterday you go into communities and you ask them to perform and they do hip hop everywhere you go if it's on the Cape Flats and the cities if you go out into again deserted places kids know hip hop so it's what they relate to and there is so many powerful things that people I know in the hip hop industry have incredible integrity um and and that made me fall in love with the power of the values of hip hop and if we can teach the kids that again the real core values of hip hop then I think we can make changes there as well. Thank you. Could we take some questions please? Thank you Siam. I'm wondering I know that there's been discussion with the QPAC, the Brisbane Performing Arts Centre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre with Fred. Yeah Fred has invited the production to... Can you tell us a little bit about how you thought of reconfiguring it or repackaging it for it to make sense to say an English audience or an audience that might you know it may not be linguistically aware of everything. Yeah so what you've seen here was the very first one we had one we only did it one time we had an hour to move into the theatre and that's what we did. So we did it a second time after Fred's invitation came and then what I did do was introduce English speaking hip hop artists into it as well as a female artist that has she's from Cape Town but she's a lot more famous in Nigeria and those areas than she is in Cape Town so I put them into the production even though it was at an Afrikaans festival but they give me great freedom and we tested the work to see what if we introduced the other languages into it and it worked really well because it's hip hop so you can really mix everything and it was well received as well. Any other questions? Oh there's the lady at the back. Did you please... I know what this production means to you so and I also understand that we need to stay true to the cause and I feel lashing on to what Ricardo asked is is there a form of subtitles or AV or any sense of multimedia that you could implement in such a production to get it closer to an international audience? I ideally wouldn't like to do that. The dream would be that wherever we go we fuse with the people who are there so if we go to Brisbane, if I'm not on to, if we go to Brisbane what I've been looking at their dance there the traditional dance that Fred and them do is in the red dust just like and you confuse the two dancers of real and their dance so easily so what we would want to do is incorporate what they mustn't just be our whole cause going oh this is our story it's about how our stories come together so ideally I would want to work with artists from that area and create the connections and it's been it's been pretty easy even with this we I mean a lot of our mcs are not from Cape Town so we worked remotely. Whatsapp is amazing in Skype. Before you go could you tell the audience what kind of conversations would you like to have with people here after this pitch? Connecting conversations if there's anybody that thinks that you have something that you would like to connect on and how we can connect to take this further and even feedback from you and advice on on what it's missing because sitting in this context now like I realized that it's it's not as diverse as as I thought it was when I started it and every time like I said to somebody today the truth changes every day because you learn more so yeah connections to make it go further. If I might ask also a question sorry what were some of the reactions and comments after your performance? It was incredible so what we did was we also my heartbeat is to take theatre to people that don't experience it often so we bust in people from about three hours out of Cape Town that have never been into a theatre and there were even though we were challenging the standard white border africans one of the most touching things for me was I think that Auntie was over 60 70 years old and she had tears in her eyes a white lady and she said to me every South African needs to see this and that was the feedback from a lot of the people and surprisingly the very people that we thought we were challenging but it's done with love so I think it makes it it makes it absorb better. Thank you very much for that. I'm just wearing a hat as any South African management it's quite a massive production it's big in terms of the number of costs just how you're going to package all of that and take it anywhere you'll also have children in the production so there's also childcare laws and whatever else that comes into play instead of thinking of taking the production out have you given consideration to touring the production locally to regional theatres in South Africa but then maybe working with international partners to bring hip-hop artists and other artists on a collaboration locally and to be able to give the work life and a further run within the country and particularly within the larger western and eastern Cape areas but collaborating then with African artists and hip-hop artists from other parts of the globe who could come and then work here as a kind of reversal to wanting to tour outside but to allow real exchange to happen the other way around with the production. I agree that it needs to happen year first it does need to happen year first and the magnitude of the cost does make it difficult I'm very blessed that the kids that we work with are incredibly easy and their teachers are or I have of their principle the deputy principal will travel with them so the education doesn't stop and we can do it with a smaller cost and we are starting already Adam Haft has a project called in the key of B where it already mixes English, Afrikaant and Hausta so we're looking at at doing smaller versions of it of it here I do also have just the full link DVD if anybody wants a copy I've got a couple of copies oh sorry the gentleman here oh okay okay he's got the copies anything else cool thank you please a round of applause just double checking so the the next one that the pitch is dear Oliver Tambo with Sifu, Manya Keeni Sifu please come up and everybody a big warm welcome applause Sifu is going to be I have to follow Shyam's example go for it Sifu good morning they said I must follow her example okay my name is Sifu and I was not sure whether I have the control of this thing but it's up there and I'm going to ask just to indicate and say then you go to the next slide I didn't know how to do this but this is the best we're going to do I'll give a presentation of five minutes at most then have also a video but our video is less it's three minutes our production is called dear Oliver Tambo okay I won't talk about my company it's called Smile Music we work with a number of things one of them is theatre poetry and music we can move on in this production dear Oliver Tambo we we fuse a couple of disciplines if I can call them that drama poetry storytelling dance finite and music in a live band um this is a history of how we came about in 2007 we did a music show in honor of Oliver Tambo I'm sure most of you will know the name Oliver Tambo it was just music 60% of songs of freedom songs struggle songs have the name Oliver Tambo if you listen to the songs now and again there's Oliver Tambo as a young boy I grew up asking who's this Oliver Tambo cos everybody seems to like him then I researched I loved him and I wrote this production it was music first then we made it into a theatre production we funded ourselves from 2010 2014 and then 2014 fortunately Mzanzi gave us some little money I've learned to call it little money Mzanzi gave us some little money and then they gave it to us again they've given to us three times now to talk we do very short tours one day we'd love to do a three week one day we've been to Port Elizabeth we've been to Pretoria a couple of small places we would love to get more people hearing our show we have in small audience of hundred people at the time but we'd love to have people talk about it like Sarafina my role model is Sarafina we'd love this play to reach near Sarafina um okay these are a couple of photos you can just move on until the photos are done these are some of the images in our production um we want we realize that we don't have resources so we can do it with five people cast in any hall with without lighting with without sound we can do it with 20 people with small lighting and small sound but ultimately we want to do it with about 30 people on stage a full band just like the one we just saw we loved that we just don't know how to carry it around because sometimes we just use three cars that we do our best with the little that we have we cannot wait forever okay this is the setup we can move on and these these are the characters in our production it's eight people there are always eight the rest is musicians then we can put a couple of dancers to customize it when you get to a place we celebrate Oliver Tambo and many other leaders we get to Guatemala we celebrate Chris Lamine because he's he's from Guatemala we get to we get to I don't know we get to we get to in Kansas wherever we go we choose a person there and we celebrate okay every every every area has a hero so we recognize the heroes in that area um okay okay this is basically the reason of Oliver Tambo the play to pay tribute to the men Oliver and all other leaders and then secondly to preserve the freedom songs these songs that were sung to the struggle are nice songs they're beautiful songs they need to be preserved I believe that maybe you can you know put a disclaimer here and there but the songs themselves cannot be let go I think American spirituals remain in force even today because they carry some weight of where people come from so this is our thought and then to hail and song heroes what do we want we'd love to extend our reach we've been to South Africa to a couple of towns we'd love to go to more South African cities we'd love to go to Lisoto, Botswana and ultimately Nigeria and then finally okay when you when when he presses the next click it's going to go to the video it's three minutes long more or less hopefully it gives you an idea of what happens when you've got limited resources there must be some problem even if you can go to the folder and just click the video itself because this one is linked to the to the powerpoint I'm sure if you go directly to it and tell us all if the memories is vivid as if it had happened yesterday no that's a sentence or one one little thing I forgot it's a story about a young girl who hears about Oliver Tambo and she asks her mother to tell about Tambo and the values that he carried and she wants to use those values to help the young people today to face their challenges thank you very much I'm very intrigued about how flexible your production is it can go from 30 to 5 you said and your performers how do you keep them engaged with the production because you say the tours are not frequent so how do you keep your performance a performance engaged we are a very close knit group we are always in touch with each other some of them are from Blom from some from Johannesburg some from Guagua so we always talk the Tambo is not frequent but we have other little things we do we've got a play called pregnant christian a single pregnant christian we've got small things that we do the Tambo is our biggest project but we are always in touch it sounds like you operate like a collective and you stay in touch and work together and thereby keep a spirit going yes because we don't have money to hire staff so we use friends we are a network of people who are close to each other when we've got money everybody got paid we were just in Gramstown last week nobody got paid but we went there spent a week there did performances thank you does anyone have any questions to ask see we met in Kwakwa when there was a kind of a co-production happening with the dutch and the university with the identities and the community engagement there from the local community was just extraordinary can you tell us a little bit about the strategies you have if you're thinking of going into different communities say in a pan-african environment or even internationally if there were people interested in Oliver Tambo how would you engage locally with kind of key stakeholders from where you're going how how we would do that i hope i understood the question how we would do that firstly would go there firstly on invitation by somebody so whoever invited us they would know the key stakeholders the people we can engage with but i think what's more important is to make sure that the story is relevant to the people we'll be speaking to one by including some of their leaders because the struggle in South Africa was not South African it was an African that's why when people say hail sorry sorry and so many names rise from Kwame Nguruma from people who were in other countries so we would include their leaders there link their struggle with our struggle to make the play make sense but in terms of networking i'm sure sitting down with the people who have invited us who know the stakeholders i would i wouldn't say it i know i've never been out of out of i've never been out of africa have only been in america in belgia but i've never been in other countries of africa and that's why i was excited to be part of this i was excited when you mentioned Nigeria because i remember when Nelson Mandela was free was freed um i was the artistic director of the poetry club in university battle and we did a huge performance of south african poets dressing as we imagined south africans dressed i look at i look back and i laugh at ourselves but it was it was an amazing and we have a couple of leaders like Ty Sholari that i'm sure would like to insert into your your production yeah have you considered um an idea of education pack that might go to schools um maybe one actress or two actresses with an education resource that might go into schools and is there a funding system or support network that would support that kind of work in this region we are looking for possible funding networks and sources yes actually we've got a book that i wrote it's called dear livertambo it's a book about lessons that young people can learn from livertambo young people love music so when we do the music part of it there's excitement even the play itself there's excitement and we also do like i said a smile music we do motivational talks we do inspirational speaking when we go there it's all part of it it would be an amazing thing if it could go to schools that's actually the feedback we get whenever we perform it take it to schools but we wish we could any other questions thank you the money that you got from the zanzi golden economy fund was that for touring or was that for seed money to set up your company and to get it going that's the first question i have the the second question i have is when you do work like this that is celebratory work have you considered trying to get endorsements of for example the olive and adelaide tambo foundation uh the apatrate museum and other agencies in south africa who can maybe input into the work both in terms of context story narratives and whatever else but also be able to support the work simply by adding their gravitas to the work and have you considered that okay thank you for the question the first question and the the funding from zanzi was for the touring touring wax and i know their intention is to help us set up so that we can be self-sufficient it's it's it's quite difficult because as much as they give us good money but it's never sufficient because our tour our tour of seven towns would cost us for example 400 000 and this is what they give you which is equal to the cost of the tour but we are working on bettering ourselves um with endorsement yes the first thing i did in 2007 was contact uh cistilani tambo because i didn't know about oliva tambo foundation i wrote to her spoke to her over the net she told me no it's fine you do not need permission that's what she said because i wanted permission so we started doing it a couple of years later we we contacted the government people because we thought they i mean they are the government so we're always giving you know running around yes do it but no support recently i spoke to the oliva tambo foundation in our last tour they were they knew what we were doing we're looking for an opportunity to come together for them to see it but they know about it we send them brief emails of how far we are so but we have not yet gotten in touch with them hopefully we will soon but we went to the grave of oliva tambo and we told him about it so thank you very much and please continue having conversations with gentlemen after this session please a round of applause the next picture we have is called truth about the truth by sylvestre magella next one is half leg am i pronouncing it correctly half liek the pink couch slash tara not cut good morning wow chwe more hello how's everyone doing good cold i know right and this whole room is made of cement so that's even better um my my name is tara not cut i am a 31 year old director writer dramaturg curator et cetera et cetera et cetera from capetown and i don't say that to blow my own horn i just say it because i think a lot of people in this room are their own writers directors et cetera et cetera et cetera so i feel like it's a position that's a lot of people understand um and when i talk a little bit about the play i think you'll you'll yeah you'll see what i'm saying um so i am from a company called the pink couch which is actually strictly a collective it's a group of friends who when we graduated we thought okay cool instead of sort of doing work on our own let's have a name that when we do work together of you know the kinds of things that we would like to talk about we can sort of build up a little bit of steam um we've done various things to various countries hey look at you it's like a whole set now thanks uh no that's perfect thank you and our mission from the outset has been to make to make theatre that we would like to see so that's taken many different forms my my work personally as a as a theatre maker is very varied from intimate drama to physical theatre to workshop theatre to stand-up comedy to dance to illusion to opera to lots of stuff and the reason i say that is because you know often often in south africa and there was something that she home sort of touched on people kind of go okay well you know who you're making this for what what are you doing what's your thing what's your vibe and i've always kind of felt really uncomfortable with that because i think particularly being a theatre maker in south africa but i think being a theatre maker really anywhere you have to have a lot of strings to your bow um and i think my thing or my vibe and the thing that i'm quite proud of is that i've been able to work in various different forms and i have various different interests and i like to think that's for at least a couple of them i have a little bit of style so stylistically my personal thing that kind of links all of these different interests together is uh workshopping um i really enjoy workshopping i half liech which is the play that i'm going to talk about in a second came out of a workshop sort of environment and a lot of my other work is made in that way um why i enjoy this is because i i enjoy working with people i don't only want to tell sort of my own stories i had a really happy childhood i don't have a lot to say personally but i like i like engaging with other people and going okay cool i i have a certain set of skills theatrically that i would like to hear the thing that you would like to tell or bring to life and let me help make that happen so that's i guess to foreshadow the question which is probably going to come later as to what sort of connection i would be seeking out of this kind of environment would be that um kind of going okay here i come with a set of skills and i would i'd really enjoy engaging with people who have things to say or have different styles and seeing where collaborations and things can happen so i my sister runs a hip hop competition no hip hop showcase in Cape Town Cape Town's most wanted yeah yeah that's my system my dad and my mom and we'll talk afterwards anyway but but when when she hum is talking about the sort of hip hop philosophy it's something that i've grown up with and i think uh collaboration is really amazing and so something like pace and being here is a really great opportunity to engage with lovely people like yourselves so half leir is uh for those of you who don't speak opera cons it means a half empty which is a really cynical title uh for what i hope is quite an optimistic play um it's actually the play is the product of five years of work it started in 2013 and it's started in english and like a lot of plays it started a very long way away from where it is now in fact so far away that again started in english went to another country came back and now on tuesday afternoon at five o'clock i had to remember that it was like it's a three o'clock or five o'clock i can't remember but at five o'clock in the cake nitsgana it will be here in opera cons which is quite exciting um so it started with the actress who's currently performing it um it had a different actress in between who did the english version and now it's sort of come back full circle to the original actress um but the play started quite a long time before that with many nights on a bar stool in dark corners of bars putting money into juke boxes to try and make the best playlist possible for two in the morning uh writing song lyrics on serviets and which are then stuck in a box under my bed so i i'd go out sit in you know with friends bad dates various conversations waiting for my best friend to finish his just one more drink and i pretty soon ended up with a box full of serviets under my bed and so pulled the box out and laid all the serviets out in the lounge and started to kind of piece it together sort of find common themes and so on so sort of a little workshop just with myself and my own head uh and it was wonderfully nostalgic sort of seeing all these memories or thoughts and some were super naive because it had been a while and i like to think i've also matured and grown up a little bit over that time uh yeah so some super naive some of the things i'd completely forgotten a lot of it was really dramatic very angsty very young but after i'd sorted through you know the junk and the stuff that i wanted to keep i started to find what i thought would make a pretty cool play so it's weird because i hadn't actually intended to write this play it kind of grew under my bed like your mom always says if you don't wash your dishes or something then something's gonna it was kind of that situation but all i really knew at that point was that i really wanted to work with women so the pink couch actually is me and a whole bunch of dudes primarily men i function really well in groups of men so i mean this is this is fairly fairly new a bit very close to my heart my best friends are men and then yeah like i said the pink couch is some men and me when i was doing my third play i got asked in an interview so what kind of example do you feel like you're setting for young women and because i was you know all of 22 i was like you know am i myself a self-producing young woman not a good example you know in myself and they said yeah but i mean if you're just if what you're show people don't see you behind the scenes they see what they see on stage so if all you're showing is a bunch of dudes on stage what kind of example are you really setting so now that i'm a little older i still believe that my answer is the same but i feel like it's only the beginning of the answer and again because people see they only see what's on stage so i can be as good an example behind the scenes as i want and have all the values that i want but until i changed what i was putting out there that's all the people we're going to see so anyway i'm sitting on the floor in my lounge putting all my thoughts in order and what appears is the story of a woman sitting in a bar waiting for a guy which i promise that is not what the play is about it's actually it's actually it's a play about loneliness the expectations that society places on women in you know sort of from the good old 1950s and the search for a real connection in an ever more connected world that we currently live in with the ultimate 90s soundtrack to match uh like i say the play was originally performed in english um with a really great actress named rebecca makin taylor who's just moved to joeberg to pursue a great career there and it was a really great opportunity to grow the work with someone different to who i originally had in mind so keeping with the sort of collaborative sense of it we changed things to suit her style her personality she brought her own stories in and we collaborated to see what we could make together in the original version it's called last rounds it's went to grahamstown it's been performed in capetown joeberg and we took it to the blue room theater in proth as part of their summer nights program so cut to two years later and i finally get to do the play in off ricons which i'd always wanted to do with the actress that i really really wanted to do it with uh we got approached by art club who in turn approached riccardo at fresa constipias they pledged a tiny a little bit of support and that helped make the play come to life and from i mean i'm speaking as someone who i think most of my rehearsals for most of the plays i've ever done have happened in a room this size in my lounge like moving all the furniture i think people maybe understand this feeling but i'm seeing a lot of nodding heads over here um it's been yeah it was translated by amy jeffter who's actually just blown to new york to do fabulous things over there so it's the plays involved a lot of amazing people who in turn have gone on to do their own amazing things and it's been a wonderful process because it's meant you know every different person that's come in has sort of influenced it in some incredible way and we got to develop it even further with centain i'm a little bit older now she's a little bit older it matures a little bit goes back to its original ending which is very sad so if you're coming on tuesday it brings up tissues but um i think what's been the best thing about it and it's a bit of a weird pitch because i'm not so much pitching the play so much as what the play has taught me um because it's it's growing me as an artist in a much in a much bigger and much more significant way so as a lot of people in data can tell you you know it's easy to cast whoever you want in a play but it's i've started to feel that it's much more important well not much more but incredibly important also to concentrate on who you have behind the scenes so often i'll go sit in a theatre and kept on and i'll open a program and there's you know as diverse a cast in every single way that you want on stage but behind the scenes it's the dude and a dude and a dude and a dude and no offense to the dudes you're all really great as i've said and i like you all probably way too much but um you know except maybe the costume designer that's probably going to be a woman maybe um and i mean that's not a kept on specific thing that's the same in a lot of parts of the world you look at the tony awards list you look at the Olivia awards lists it's very male heavy so i have spent most of my career being the only woman in the room and i've always been very proud of that and now that i'm 31 i kind of go well if i'm self producing my own stuff if i'm finding and making the connections that i need to make in order to make work happen i should really put my money where my mouth is and change what is behind the scenes as well so that i'm not the only woman on this side of the table that i'm actually sort of surrounded by more and this led to my most ambitious project which was an all-female taming of the shrew which we presented at main oval which is our annual Shakespeare in the park in Cape Town every single person who worked on their production from actors to designers to the publicist to the person who designed the programs to the person who took the photographs was a woman i employed 18 women for two hormones and stage the first all-female Shakespeare in 62 years at main oval and the only way that i came to that point was this box of Soviets under my bed like if not for that i probably wouldn't be there see this tiny little play which has been done in different languages and had this weird kind of amazing journey has been made possible by amazing woman it's written by a woman performed by a woman stage manager designed everything it is a touring party of just two people so if anyone's interested it's a very cheap show i promise but five years later i look forward to not only where the show can go but where not only where the show can go but the things that i will get to do because of the things that i've learned from it i'm not only interested in taking the show itself it's it's a tiny little play it's not going to change the world it's it's very sweet it's very lovely it talks about loneliness it's something that a lot of women particularly of certain ages can really relate to but i think what is most important is the conversations that happen around it the things that people talk about once they see it the things that if centena and i go somewhere and we do a workshop at the school or we do a talk for young women in whichever community we're in those are the things that are the most exciting and part of what i'm really interested in is again taking the skills that i've learned and from everything sort of backstage from producing to actually putting something on this stage i know you're doing that walking thing i'm almost done i promise everyone else talked so long you know and if that's taking the show somewhere amazing if that's a series of workshops even better if that's getting to spend a bit of substantial time in a place wherever that is in a city wherever that is in a town wherever that is actually engaging with people and helping them solve their stories that's probably the first prize so yeah will the play about loneliness you know change the world probably not but i think what i've learned from it is probably even more important than that so thanks do you want to ask me things thank you the first thing i want to ask you is does the play on tuesday have subtitles for non-africans speakers sorry it does not have subtitles but it's a very very colloquial kind of africans there's a lot of it that's in there is actually chunks of it that are in english the soundtrack is also completely english as well which sort of underscores the whole play and it's it's one of those i mean you know you go watch a dance production and that's it's a non-verbal language you go watch something maybe in german and i think a lot of people can still understand sort of what's what's happening in it it's a beautiful little human story and so no to answer your question no subtitles but i think that there is still a lot that can be yeah gain from it thank you is any questions ricardo taro thank you for that if you um and it's a beautifully designed kind of visual scenario that happens with what it is that you do on the stage i think that kind of tone that that you use locally now is known as cyberpunk bisexual you because it's got those the pink and the blues kind of mixing can you tell us a little bit about the the set itself to kind of give people a bit of a visual around what it could look like and then also how it could uh you said it's tour already internationally with english actors or previously how you could adapt it in the future for others also maybe to tour it internationally cool um so basically what is on stage is a table of chair and we wanted to make it look like a 90s music video so if it's half set in a bar and half set on a party bus and if anyone's been on a party bus i'm very very sorry and i see some laughing yes um so it's it's flashing lights it's very loud it's very poppy it's very it's a lot of fun and at the very end there's a six minute confetti fall of gold confetti that happens which is probably the most visually spectacular part of it but uh the idea is that it's you know we're on quite a big stage but the whole thing happens in a tiny little block like that so it's a tiny little story and yeah to to speak to sort of touring with it um you know we've been approached by different people to you know translate it to do it with different actresses in different places and i'm very open to that kind of thing i think it's great it's oh even sort of taking you know the framework of what we've done and go okay cool well you know maybe you would have a different story about your full first kiss so put that in there instead um but yeah like i said it has been done in english and tain's also able to perform in english as well um and we'd be very keen to yeah to explore sort of different options with it i have a question you spoke a lot about your workshopping and um i did find your description of how you got to the play via the box of survey it's very interesting but also very useful very useful to pass on to performers that make their own work so my question is are you plugged into any female collectors because that seems to be a theme of interest to you and any um artists self freelance artists that you can pass or develop workshops for how to get your own play on the road have you i think i'm asking have you developed that kind of package are you sharing that kind of knowledge in any shape or form um that's started to happen now um the this sort of the sort of um female kind of push and interest has been something sort of of the last like two years that i've put actual kind of a lot of energy into and it's something that i would definitely like to grow i have with the show and with all the shows that i do depending on what it is um have you know if we go and do it somewhere there's a little workshop that comes with it that's not only you know the performer goes and does something with actors and then to the people who maybe don't want to be on stage but sort of enjoy seeing how it's put together behind the scenes i you know you have a talk and you go okay cool if you have a story what's a cool way of breaking it down i think visually so i think post-its or soviets maybe how do you think okay cool how do we make that work how do how do we help get this thing that's in here you know over here and then over here any questions i have a question what are your immediate plans after the pace conference what what do you want to set into action concerning your production concerning the production it it would be it would be great to it would be great to do tour it um what we'd really like to do is take it to girl schools because a lot of what it deals with i think it creates really good conversations that i think a lot of young women experience um and myself what i'm particularly interested in is um i've been starting to look at things like artist residencies and things that i can apply for to actually go and work in other places and sort of you know not only take things that i've learned to somewhere else but actually learn from different cultures from different people so immediately that's sort of what the interest is yes question um i i'm noticing a the female theme which i love i just want to find out how do you want your male audience to perceive the um the production gosh that's a really good question um i think like the put it this way like i don't i don't want the female thing to be exclusive so i don't i would hate if anybody sort of saw it and kind of went oh i don't want to go watch that because i'll be put off it because of x by z reasons i think it's it's a human story at the end of the day and that's it just happens to be told by a woman it very easily could be a guy sitting in the bar very could easily be sort of anybody else and you know people will perceive it in whatever way they will because of who they sort of see on stage and at the moment that's who it is and yeah but at the end of the day i i hope that it's in some way kind of relatable to everybody because at the heart of it you know we're all the same on the inside so yeah that answers your question okay just to round up tara i think please have conversations with tara about her production and touring it but also she said something about not being a role model if you're behind the scenes i would completely disagree i mean for my discussions with artists one of the biggest things they need are producers state managers peep dramaturgs people that help them bring an idea to life is i think if you are into acting or playwriting for you to start thinking about how do i organise rehearsals do the administration fundraise and think of the visuals the set which most of you have to do as well is very difficult so please have discussions with her about how do i get to do this and produce this because maybe there's workshop ideas in there that might be useful and develop networks and forums where we can share that kind of knowledge so thank you very much round of applause for tara thank you everybody we're running a little bit late so we're all going to go now to the sky and I grab a coffee etc so the next session might start probably around 20 past 11 not quite 11 but thank you everybody for pitching some people were virgin pictures you did a fantastic job um and you know this is kind of what we're going to be doing uh more and more and now that you're used to it um you know you were also live streamed so the world saw your pictures so you might get some calls from America but thank you very much thank you for the tech staff here as well for your for your questions and your technical help because it's wonderful to have everybody involved okay let's move it up to the sky and I grab a coffee thank you