PlayCo and The Africa Center, in association with the National Black Theatre, present Survival, an inter-generational reading featuring two of the play's original creators.

A product of Workshop '71, the first interracial theatre company in South Africa, Survival was devised in a highly physical, experimental style under conditions of radical uncertainty and repression. Launched shortly before the 1976 student uprisings, the play's searing, irreverent tone captured carceral life during Apartheid and tapped into the collective spirit shared among Black South Africans. Touring extensively in turbulent times, Survival was shut down by the army mid-performance in Soweto, and in 1977 invited to tour California. Shortly after, the play was banned in South Africa, and the cast remained in the US in exile.

This event reunites Fana Kekana and Seth Sibanda, two members of the original Workshop '71, and will include a post-show conversation with artists, South African community leaders, and the audience facilitated by Jonathan McCrory, National Black Theatre's Executive Artistic Director.

Directed Keenan Tyler Oliphant + Joanna Ruth Evans
Featuring David Glover, Fana Kekana, Namisa Mdlalose, Seth Sibanda & Vuyo Sotashe



DIRECTOR’S NOTE

In 1976 Workshop 71 set out to devise a new play under conditions of intense repression. As Fana explained to me: 

“first we said we wanted to do a play about prison. But as the research was going… we discovered that this whole country is a prison. So the approach should be that.”

When I first read Survival I was captivated by its meta-theatricality, its humor, its expression of raw anger, and its theory of struggle.  When I met Seth Sibanda in 2022, and later Fana Kekana, I learned more about the many adaptations this play has made as it toured through wildly changing contexts in South Africa and the United States, from maximum security prisons, to Soweto in the midst of the 1976 uprising, from off-Broadway theaters to right here in Harlem on the day of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990. As it moved, Survival would change to incorporate new events, duck censorship, and respond to shifting environments.

I was amazed when Seth and Fana agreed to once more enter and tranform Survival, this time for a reading at the Africa Center in 2024. I thank them for their incredible generosity in returning to the characters they created nearly 50 years ago, for patiently teaching us the original songs and sharing their memories as we worked, and for trusting us to join them in sharing Survival once more — in a radically different, but nonetheless politically charged moment.

— Joanna Evans

Four Small Gods (2016)

The last four living things on earth after the big flood: a human, a rhino, a panther and a dog. Also, an egg! Perhaps a god? How to survive, and why would we want to? Where does this boat end? And why are there so many ladders?

Four Small Gods is meta-theatrical unravelling of the rules of humanist survival and the language that underwrites them, and a tragi-comic bellyflop into the ethical collapse at their limits.

“There's immense beauty and power in this tale...definitely a play of the moment.”
        - Benn vd Westhuizen, Artlink

“Explosive and emotive”
    - Frances Aron, Bizcommunity

“The very serious implication of who rules over what is dealt with with humour and some very amusing linguistic acrobatics…Evans has created a surreal landscape inhabited with imagined, yet totally believable characters with a thought provoking script.”
    - Tracey Saunders, Cape Times

Written + directed Joanna Evans
Featuring Siya Ngcoba, Iman Isaacs, Richard September, Amy Louise Wilson, Matthew King and Nandipha Tavares Calburn
Set design Francois Knoetze
Sound design + original composition John Withers
Produced Imbewu Arts

Winner of 2014 Imbewu Arts Scribe Award for Best New Script

The Year of the Bicycle (2013 on)

In the cyclical space of memory two estranged childhood friends meet: their bodies are broken, but their thoughts are very loud as they reach out for contact. 

“An instantaneous resounding applause and standing ovation. What more needs to be said? The Year of the Bicycle is good and the people know it. They feel it … viewing South Africa’s tense transformation, through children’s innocently perceptive eyes, makes for a superb, moving, haunting piece of theatre.”
    - Sarah Roberson, The Critter

“(T)he experimental epic, The Year of the Bicycle, presents stark performances and chilling brilliance to evoke a childhood enmeshed in turmoil during the twilight of apartheid… It is a fascinating and whimsical tale which leaves a somewhat bitter aftertaste, vividly potent with its social rendering.”
    - Benn van der Westhuizen, What’s On in Cape Town

“The Year of the Bicycle is one of those works which seamlessly marries physical theatre with poetry... A terrific maw opens in your heart and spirit about the irrevocable horror of loss and the inestimable sadness that comes of deep friendships rift and tossed at the whim of the vagaries of others.”
    - Robyn Sassen, My View

“We don’t cry during The Year of the Bicycle because it is soppy. We wail because it so damn defiant.”
    - Mike Loewe, The Critter

Winner of the Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award, South African National Arts Festival (2013)

Written and directed Joanna Evans
Featuring Aphiwe Livi + Amy Louise Wilson
Sound design + original composition John Withers

Inala Theater (2013 - 2018)

Inala Theater is an exciting collective of South African artists brought together by a shared commitment to quality theatre for all ages. Combining their skills in Bunraku puppetry, object theatre, clowning, and African music, they explore the power of the imagination to transform the everyday into the magical. Dedicated to intensive research with their target age groups, Inala’s original productions find unique ways to meet their young audiences eye-to-eye, mind-to-mind. As one of the the first company’s in South Africa to create work for pre-verbal audiences, they have played a pioneering role in the burgeoning Theatre for Early Years industry.

The team came together in early 2013 as Pillow Fort Theatre, when they were selected as the only non-European company worldwide to receive Small Size Seed Funding from the European Union. From this Patchwork was born, which went on to tour nationally and globally, and was awarded Best International Performance at the 2015 International Festival of Theatre for Children and Youth in Iran. Other works include Just Here, which was created especially for children in hospitals and care homes, and Titum Titum, which introduces young audiences to an understanding of pregnancy and the creation of new life. Inala’s latest production is a Bunraku puppetry piece called Lumka, which has just returned from representing South Africa at the BRICKS Festival in Dugastan, Russia.

The Inala team are Asanda Rilityana, Roshina Ratnam, Joanna Evans and Pedro Espi-Sanchis.