Soweto Theatre hosts a collaborative dance work that celebrates what Steve Biko strove – and died – for, writes Robyn Sassen.
“Hero doesn’t begin to describe him,” said Jazzart choreographer Jacqueline Manyaapelo of Steven Bantu Biko, celebrated in Biko’s Quest, a dance work on at the Soweto Theatre this week.
Manyaapelo was talking to Cue TV at last year’s National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.
The idea to present it in Soweto – and now – came from Warona Seane, the artistic director of the Soweto Theatre, which enjoys the support of the Artscape Theatre, where Mbothwe is the creative manager.
Biko’s Quest is under the direction of theatre stalwart Mandla Mbothwe, mooted by critic Brent Meersman in the Mail & Guardian in 2009 as arguably one of South Africa’s most under-appreciated directors.
“Seane and I decided to showcase Biko’s Quest during the week of Soweto Day. It considers what Biko’s quest was and enables audiences to reflect on what South Africa really lost on September 12 1977.”
Manyaapelo, the former artistic director of the Jazzart Dance Company, is one of the choreographers responsible for the “baby” that she and Mbothwe created together.
It was conceived while the architecture of the Steve Biko Centre in Ginsberg (as the King William’s Town township is known) in the Eastern Cape was in development. Mbothwe, who was a drama lecturer at the University of Cape Town, was head-hunted in 2010 to be the centre’s artistic director.
“My mandate at the centre was to work with the community at large in the theatre,” he told the M&G.
“It came at the right time in my life,” he says of his move to Ginsberg, where Biko was raised and buried.
It is near Emzimkhulu, where Mbothwe’s forefathers originated, so moving to the area enabled him to dig deeper into the untold stories that are based in, or originate from, the Eastern Cape.
‘What happens when the past meets the present?’
The work’s seed was sown by the exhibition Biko: The Quest for a True Humanity. Ostensibly a temporary exhibition, it opened at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg in 2007, commemorating Biko’s death 30 years before. But it travelled the country extensively and its influence continues to ricochet in South African sensibilities.
“I was so inspired by the notion of returning stolen memories [recalled by the exhibition] and bringing them to life,” Mbothwe says. The exhibition made him think: “What happens when the past meets the present? It is what history is teaching us today.
It was scripted by Lara Foot, but was further researched and developed by the cast, under Mbothwe’s direction, to become a full-scale production.
Biko’s Quest debuted at the Artscape Theatre in Cape Town in 2012 and has since been performed at various centres, including in Mozambique, and at the Grahamstown arts festival and the Afrovibes festival in the United Kingdom. The Soweto Theatre season is its Johannesburg debut.
Biko’s Quest is at the Soweto Theatre until June 19. Phone 011 930 7461 or visit
For full report by Robyn Sassen see the Mail & Guardian
PHOTO: Theatre stalwart Mandla Mbothwe. (Madelene Cronje)
