Forever and a hurricane of lace

Maqoma’s work has a tendency to leave you trembling in anguish. It’s an earth shattering experience you might not be able to rationally find the vocabulary to describe. How could it be possible to say so much with just music and movement? Genesis may take you deeper you believe possible.

Consummation by sacred flame

Ramsay is utterly formidable in this role, which brings out an immense yet delicate sense of nobility coupled with almost crippling vulnerability, and all hidden beneath the tight facade. With a profile rendered regal and indomitable by an astonishing a wig, Ramsay paints a Callas fearless, cruel, funny, irrepressibly human.

Diatribe, in the mouths of babes

Featuring phenomenal performances by Alice Findlay, Oratile Manamela, Nicola Shapiro and Ketsia Velaphi, it takes on the repetitive nature of a boarding school ethos, punctuated by gossip and politics, lessons which are both rote-based and morally confusing, and the drugs, sex and other illegal experiments conducted in the school’s interstices.

Proof of Life

‘God’s work’ is a film about ghosts and trains and broken promises. Of a brother eternally a child in the initiate’s white clay. Of a drug lord with a machete called Verwoerd, and a vast room of the dead. Of a woman who has waited one year for a train.

Lessons in anger

You don’t come away complacent from this work. Is it assaultative? Absolutely. Relatable? 100%. You feel broken, body and soul as you emerge from it. You laugh with recognition at the dark tropes and you sweat with a personal dread at where this work may go, as you experience it.

Sparkless Arabella

Soprano Louise Alder in the role of Zdenko/Zdenka lends ‘Arabella’ a feisty sense of character and her performance is one of the best reasons you should steel yourself to see this work. Her role is small, counterbalanced against that of the eponymous Arabella (performed by Rachel Willis-Sørensen), Zdenko’s elder sister.