Artscape Theatre is set to present the much awaited Spiritual Festival at the Artscape Theatre and Arena from 11 March – 02 April 2016.
Premiered in 2015, Artscape Spiritual Festival is a platform that theatre practitioners and directors are able to tell their personal narratives and collective memories through spiritual and religious interpretations.
It allows an interaction between artists and audience through music, dance, poetry, monologues, storytelling, live arts and site specific installations. Various productions present excellent performances expressing influences of their religious spirituality bringing audience closer to understanding our spiritual diversity and religious practices.
Spirituality and religious practices in African context remains a dominant and central part of our being. Artists draw inspirations from the complexities of these practices which are a reflection of our diverse society. It is also mostly commonalities of these practices, together with that of theatre performances, story-telling, and creative expressions that we find religion and spiritual aesthetics so similar.
“Theatre and performance spaces remain hugely separated from the praising and praying spaces. Among other things, The Artscape Spiritual Festival attempts to reduce this distance, to resuscitate the relationship, to inspire the exploration of our society through these spiritual and religious practices both in content and in aesthetics, says Mr Mandla Mbothwe, Creative Manager for Artscape Theatre and Spiritual Festival Director. “We embrace these drive sites through encouraging interdisciplinary representation of various identities and their practices through creative presentations”, alluded Mandla.
This year’s theme recognizes the wound of our society and the magical powers of performances and storytelling in Healing Self and Healing Society. It is to draw more and more audiences to our performance spaces, to create more and more work of our personal narratives and common memory in pursue of Healing Self and Healing Society.
Most of these newly created work gets to be further developed and some get to travel in other spaces of our communities.
WHERE: Artscape Theatre Centre Foreshore, Cape Town 8001
INFO: Themba Mzondi on 078 113 5216 or email Themba@sceproductions.co.za Visit
