Ed’s note: Highlighted text designates where the sound was unclear.

Square
brackets are designate where I edited the text for clarity.

Wilton: Just to jump in the deep end…Right in the beginning the idea of choking
on the words was like a trend throughout the play…how even the dead choke on
their own words, so I wonder how that translates into real life. Was that the
point? Was that what you were trying to represent, how choking on the words
transcends everything.

Fudwa: Why did you create this play in a language other than English and was it
part of an ‘experiement’ or experimental theatre?

Mandla: First of all the piece is a collective writing and all the cast members had
their part in the writing of it and second of all I co directed it with Fansiwa so
share the questions around (laughs). I’m tempted not to answer your question
because I don’t think you trust what you got from the play. But just simply that
it’s painful to tell stories. It’s a metaphor, ‘choking on the words’. It’s very hard
[to tell stories] and because it’s so hard and painful we often don’t tell these
stories or get an audience to listen to these stories. So it’s choking for me to tell
the stories, but it’s also choking you to listen to the stories. But if we run away
from that stage, it means we are lying because that story hasn’t disappeared
and it will come back more painfully, so for me that exists in all the words.

Faniswa: Also it’s interesting how people carry their stories in their own bodies. If
you can’t say what you need to, how does the body then speak? Because we
carry all our stories in our bodies.

Jenny: I think what’s interesting in that metaphor, ‘choking on the words’ is that
choking is a completely physical response to a supposedly verbal act, which is
also physical, so in a way it’s locating very strongly the fact that one’s
experience around narration happens through the body. We experience stories in
our bodies and we attempt to narrate them through the body. So it tries to
breaks down the separation between text, which supposedly happens from this
part above the neck, and experience, which happens below that.

Mandla: I watched a documentary about this women who had been blind and
was getting an eye transplant and this psychologist was trying to get the lady to
understand the experience of seeing now after so many years of not being able
to see. He said that people are going to expect you to be able to tell stories
without opening your mouth now, so you are also expected to read stories. IN
most cases we communicate with strangers without opening our mouths. Most
communication takes place through gesture. The body is always telling stories
even if we try to hide it. So I can tell you al lot of stories about yourselves
(laughs).

Why did I choose the language isiXhosa? Firstly, it’s for a political reason, to be
honest…

Jenny:…I’ve been asked this question before, “Why are you making theatre in
isisXhosa?” and I;m saying, “Why are you asking the question?” Why do we
assume that theatre has to be in English, maybe Afrikaans? What have we
learned about how we have to express ourselves such that we think it has to be
in a particular language?

Mandla: When someone asks me why didn’t I translate it, why didn’t I use
subtitles, I say, because I didn’t have to…

Fudwa:…When watching it one didn’t really need to read the subtitles in order to
understand what was going on because everything from the lighting, to the
music to the expression translated the story already. A lot of the time one didn’t
need to understand the language in order to translate the story.

Mandla: But I think the question is bigger than that. It’s about our general mind
set when it comes to language in theatre. Even Xhosa speakers, when they come
to see a Xhosa play, they are shocked. That is one of the wounds in the stars of
Apartheid. And it’s interesting that whenever we try to analyze theatre we do so
through the Western frame-set. And then we give it names because of the
different language and the difference in how it’s done. We say, maybe it’s
‘experimental’ theatre, maybe it’s Brecht, maybe it’s very fairytale-like, no,
maybe it’s very realistic. We’re always using that framework and so we forget
where we got that framework and we forget our own means and modes of
performances and ways we communicate stories and then when we start re-
incorporating those things people say, ‘oh there was lots of music so it must be a
musical’.

And it takes time [to shift one’s analytical framework]. I remember a long time
ago at UCT we went to Rondebosch because it was Valentine’s day and we
went to buy a Valentine’s card, and as we were walking through the aisles, a
friend of ours was on the other side of the aisle and he started laughing
hysterically and we wondered what was going on and he told us to come look,
and what he was laughing at was a Valentine’s card written in isisXhosa. It’s an
example of the condition we are in, where we undermine our own language. But
the language can actually express and speak in volumes.

Faniswa: And also in a company level we have different routes. We work a lot
with routes in the company. We have the N2 route which is the Xhosa
productions, we have the N7 route which is the Afrikaans productions, and we
have the Cape to Cairo route where we could be any language from French, to
English to isiXhosa, to Swahili.

Mandla: And members of the company are also very attached to the university of
Cape Town and when we create a production it is also attached to our own
research and what we’re researching about. And when we talk about the N2 my
research was about the route from Cape Town to the Eastern Cape and this
constant movement and asking the question about ‘home’ and what constitutes
one’s idea about ‘home’ and who decides what ‘home’ is and why there is this
constant movement. People have seen Incwaba lento… which is more of a follow-
up, which looks at these N2 stories and what those stories are about.
Meg: What struck me as really interesting was I was remembering Toni Morrison
talking about trying to write about ghosts in Beloved but when she was trying to
write Beloved’s ‘voice’ it was difficult because there’s this very abstract world
which one cannot access because how do we give language to the dead? And
why I really enjoyed the physicality of your theatre is because if the piece
belongs to any world it belongs to the world of the body and the lack of a body,
and I was looking at the translation and to a logical mind the English didn’t work
out completely, and it’s actually appropriate, and I imagine the same goes for
the Xhosa, where the language didn’t always make perfect sense, and so it
shouldn’t because the language of the living and the language of the dead are
different [and so there is an interface problem of how these different languages
interact with one another]. And that’s part of the anguish, which I think you
captured really well, through the physicality, and the translation that wasn’t
really a translation and all the other confusions, which I thought were really
superb.

Jenny: I think what’s interesting about the language of dance and the language
of physicality is that it allows for a particular kind of vertical drop into the
landscape of the story, because text tends to push a narrative, and it can also
not push, as in poetry…

Mandla: I think in this case, it is trying to work hand in hand with the language …

Jenny: I think it allows moments to descend quite deeply into the emotional
landscape of the story, as opposed to the charge of the narrative which pushes
from beginning to end.

Mandla: In terms of the spoken word itself, it’s very idiomatic, very metaphorical,
and you don’t speak that kind of isiXhosa in everyday life. Because I always
believe that there are emotional depths that one can’t express in any other
language except in the metaphors for that which one aims to express, and so for
me that opens up the meaning in such a way that transcends the realm of the
story that we’re telling here in this play. It makes it bigger. I’m always aiming to
make a theatre which doesn’t enable the audience to respond so instantly to the
story, [i.e. that there are ambiguities in how one interprets the story] because for
me, an instant comprehension is always a bit fake, where there’s this definitive
narrative structure which has a designated beginning, middle and end. You can
go home and just easily write an essay about it. But I’m looking for images,
something that’s more physical, and also for something to say that can crawl
underneath one’s skin…at night, or even in two years’ time. Ben Ochres speaks
a lot about those kind of story tellers, those magicians on stage that create this
other world.

Meg: Tony Morrison, when talking about trying to find the voice of the ghost was
saying how the voice is completely metaphorical and figurative, you actually
couldn’t cross it at all, which was really haunting because you’re trying to find a
rational explanation and actually you can’t. So I felt that worked extremely well
in your production.
Lillian: Speaking of the haunting aspect of it, when I came in the lady that was
standing over there did kind of freak me out, it was so realistic, so my question
for al the actors on stage is, how do you disconnect yourself from the audience
and stay in character and basically push the boundaries and limits of acting? Is it
difficult or does it comes with any ease?

Faniswa: It should never come with ease. It should never ever come with ease. A
comfortable actor on stage is a dangerous thing, that’s what I believe. It comes
during the rehearsal process where one is researching about the characters one
is playing and you know that hitch-hiking story about that girl on the road? Well I
think everyone has heard that story about the girl on the road and everyone tells
it like they were told it by their best friend but no one ever mentions who the
‘best friend’ is (laughs). But it’s such a universal story…Somewhere around the
world, there’s a hitchhiker. Stories are important and I believe that as an actor,
when you decide to tell a story which s not necessarily your story, but is
someone else’s story, when you get on stage, it’s not about me. It’s about that
story. That’s so important so the only way to do that is to be truthful and tell it
with as much integrity as you can. But the minute I get on stage with [my own
attitude about the story] that means I’m not giving the story it’s on dignity.

Hope: I just want to know the inspiration behind the play and when I walked in
and I saw her hitchhiking and the cars and there was a car crash I thought it was
maybe one of those typical [spook] stories where somebody dies on the road
where there was no cleansing ceremony, and because there was no cleansing
ceremony that person’s [spirit] will stay n the road and cause other cars to crash
and I was thinking at first, that it might be that kind of story, so I’m curious to
know what the inspiration behind the play was.

Faniswa: It was actually one of those stories you just told. That’s the honest
truth.

Jenny: I think Mandla already mentioned it, that this piece was sort of a sequel to
Incwaba, which is basically a story of a community that gets broken up through
migrant labour through the imperative to search for work away from the rural
communities of the Eastern Cape. And the father goes off to work and disappears
and the way I see it this piece starts to look at or begins to answer some of the
questions about what happened to him.

Mandla: It also looks at the frustration of the untold stories. Where we perform
rituals for our disappeared loved ones differently, and the frustration of not
having that chapter or that story closed. So even in the work that we don’t see, it
is part of us. We as human beings, we the living cannot rest until those stories
have been told. We can hear those stories as symbols and as signs, but as black
people we know that if experience is not collected we won’t rest. We know these
stories of our grandfathers when they say they are cold because they have been
buried in a different place, where it is not home for them. Jenny was saying that
in Incwaba we were looking at the importance of home, the importance of
belonging, the importance of traditional connection and all these notions of inter-
connectedness but also not divorcing it from the ancestors […] What happened
to those people who started their journey and never got there? When they leave
and then we don’t know what happened? What is important when telling the
story? And I think what is important is ot tell those stories and it is through
rituals that we clothethe story. There is also a national thief here when we talk
about the wound. There was a national agenda when Mandela came to power.
He spoke a lot about the ‘rainbow nation’. And because we loved it we didn’t
want to unbandage those wounds and in most cases those wounds were
unattended. They were not cleaned, they didn’t put ointment and if you look at it
now, in the day, in South Africa, that wound, that bandage is leaking. And it is
time for the country to unbandage and to deal with the pain. TRC was a gesture
but it never went down to the grassroots level. So it’s time for us to tell those
stories. In Zimbabwe it was part of the national agenda as well. All families, they
were actually encouraged to go to the bush to collect, the spirit of their brothers,
of their sisters of their fathers who died during those guerrilla warfares. That’s
important and we cannot cut corners. You cannot force healing.

Lonwabo: My question is for the actors. How are the characters assigned to
them? Do they chose the character because they know that they want to tell the
story? What motivates them to be that good on stage when they’re acting in
character?

Cast Member (Asandigla): When we started the production, the director would
give us tasks to tell our own story about something that happened. It could be
personal or a story that you heard, but in most cases, the characters we choose
to play are the characters that are close to us, so maybe that’s why we play
them so well, they are characters [that we know intimately] because we see
them everyday and they are characters that we relate to.

Neo: I think there are a lot of tensions that inform the part of your wounds as the
character and I feel like I didn’t understand all the parts of the character. I’ve got
a blank. I sort of understand that you were the assistant to the healer and I want
to know about your wound, the character’s wound.

Mandla: Can anyone from the audience answer?

Meg: I think that he was supposed to be married and his wife never appeared
and so there’s this terrible sense of longing for a lost love so I think that was his
wound. But in the end he eventually, after he dresses up as the other lady as,
which is on the verge of complete madness he suddenly comes to peace with her
and he can let it go and he feels totally liberated afterwards.

Sisanda: When I came in when the play started, somehow I only thought it was
about the stories she was talking about. Only when I saw the translations, Phalo,
and Sobukwe, it came to me that there was much more to the story. So I want
to know what are challenges when putting together [one cohesive story which is
comprised of a whole lot of individual stories]? And it was also politically inclined,
so I want to know how [that threaded its way through the individual stories to
make one whole story]?
Mandla: It’s painful. The week doesn’t end without me saying, I’m over this. I’m
going…Because I grow up in a culture where people don’t go for scripts, I’ve
worked with people through workshops and I’ve seen them struggle in trying to
put pieces together and fortunately the same people I’ve workshopped with are
the same people in the company. I worked with them at UCT and Mark
Fleishman and when making theatre with a group, you allow a sense of
ownership among a group but also you allow other voices to influence you. It’s
not always easy, it’s difficult. People who say that artists are starters they are
easier to work with because they negotiate with the wood and the hammer. It’s
fine if you’re a director and you just give the actors the script, but if you ask
them to tell their own stories, then they definitely want their stories to be part of
the end product. It’s a constant negotiation. It’s also a question of trusting the
cast members, that it’s allowed to come to the lesson space not knowing what
you’re going to do. They are so fragmented and they are so important and so it’s
difficult knowing how to narrate the journey. A lecturer friend of mine once asked
me, do you know what makes a fruit salad a fruit salad? I said Fruit? And he said
no, what makes the fruit salad is the container. And what makes a play [that’s
built up from several different parts is that frame] something that will hold
everything together. You need a spine. And creating this spine is difficult. And
this spine is the wound. And we need to keep asking ourselves, what is her
wound? And you need tramwork because sometimes when you’re so close to the
work you tend to [get carried away on one track]. And one thing I do is work very
closely with the title. So I always come up with a title before I even know what
the story is going to be.

Tarryn: I wan to know what the significance of the blankets is? I noticed there
was a blanket folded up on the trolley but the assistant didn’t use it. Is it linked
to the perception of the ghosts looking like white sheets?

Jenny: The blankets were in the rehearsal room (laughs). And they provided
oppurtunities, one to break up the space and define the space differently, so we
started playing with them and secondly, they seem to be connected to images of
comfort and wrapping, in terms of sleep and relating to death. So they started to
become more evocative; the spirits came out of them around them. So to me
they spoke to the notion of embalmment, of wrapping bodies, preparing bodies
for death, but also the comfort of sleep.

Faniswa: Like the mourners in our tradition, when someone has died in the
family, you need to have a blanket, you just sit on the mattress and you each
have a blanket when boys go for initiation, [so it also symbolizes various rituals].

Mandla: You also talk about blankets in the disaster relief things. But there’s also
something about a particular kind of blanket as a disaster-relief thing. And there
are pep store blankets you can get for R10,50, and in prison, so it’s the cheapest
blanket that gets used for different purposes. And there’s just something about
blankets and accidents because they are shaking and they’re cold and there’s
something about people sitting with these blankets wrapped around…that image
itself [is powerful].
Lukas: First of all the singing was just awesome. I just wanted to know if the
songs were traditional songs or if you had written them? And were the songs in
Xhosa because I didn’t hear any clicks in it?

Singer: IN the beginning we had music classes where we were taught how to sue
our voice and compose a song so Mandla the director gave the music teacher the
name of the production and we had to work around that so we composed the
songs ourselves.

Mandla: What happens is some of the songs we use because we know the
audience has some way of relating to them, like for instance there is a church
song, so it’s a combination of songs we gave to the musical director and we
asked the cast members to come with songs that spoke to them, so I aks them to
go look for a song that invokes spirituality in you, or a song that evokes warmth.
And the musical director would find a way of recreating the essence of that song
for stage, and some of the songs we hear them just as they are, like the church
song. And Xhosa speakers can easily pick up th melody and the harmony and so
the audience will engage and relate to the song, because those particular
traditional songs are recognizable .

Faniswa: Also there’s a way that old traditional songs are sung. They almost
sound like a calling and it has the same intonation.

Mandla: We have all heard ‘tula mama, tula, tula,’ but they way that we sang it
had to mean more than just the one we all recognize. The question is how dowe
find newness and freshness in things that are already popular. The same goes
with storytelling. Story tellers tell the same story, but the story teller will always
re-invent it somehow, [so that each story will always be idiosybcratic]. We know
what the story is, but we will always be enticed by how it is retold. So that’s what
we want to do, is have people recognize the work, but also make it fresh and
new.

Jerome: For Jenny I want to know are you given a story and then just told to add
movements or do you have any input to the story itself? I also want to know how
much of your training in Paris did you incorporate into the show, like your
clowning from Josh de coch?

Aidan: I just want to ask where you got that barrier from because I want one.
More importantly, what’s the role of ‘the void’ over there and how does it link up
with the symbolism of the road? Because I found that and the images on there
quite interesting.

Astrid: I think as an audience, everyone has a specific part that meant something
to them, mine was just the small part where the girl when I came in put her
thumb in her mouth, and she was hitchhiking with it too, I just wanted to know
what the symbolic meaning was behind that. Also the symbolism of the hands
coming through that white area there.

?: I also wanted to ask about the thing at the back there, because there were
eyes over there and lips like someone looking over, and I also wanted to know
about the healer’s wound because it seemed like she was helping everybody
else but then the tata says… So I want to know, what’s her wound?

Wilton: I want to know about the idea about ‘peel it off’ obviously it was a trend
throughout the play and you spoke about it a little bit earlier. Not only to peel off
the wound, to me it also stood for, to move away from what’s holding you back
you have to strip yourself physically, emotionally, completely. Was that the
idea? As an aspiring creative writer I need to understand from different
perspectives, how does one take oneself out of your own body and exist in the
mind of another? Because that’s what I’m struggling with.

Jenny: Just in terms of my training Jacque le coque doesn’t just teach clowning,
basically when I speak about my training there I always say that he gave me the
gift of myself. By that I mean he pointed me to my own body, for one thing and
my own narratives as a source of making theatre, which partially answers your
question about how does one see things from different perspectives. I see things
from different perspectives by going deeply into my own. One thinks one has to
make theatre by jumping out, but actually ones makes theatre by jumping in,
very very deeply. So the gift that Jacque le coque gives is this notion of individual
narratives as being the source of theatre. But more than that he teaches teatre
d’movement which is theatre of movement so he says everything moves, tout
bouge, and the body is always expressive. The body is always telling a story. It
could be a little surface story, or it could be a much more subterranean story
where the language is more abstract. Then the interesting thing about bringing
that pedagogy into South Africa, is that the body, and in particular this piece, the
body is the site where a violent action happens. Violence isn’t an abstract notion
that happens out there, it happens to the body and it is also through
understanding that that one can potentially find a place of healing around the
body; to explore how the body might resist that complete annihilation that
happens through violence. So here, what’s happening with the language of the
bodies in the space is that they’ve all been victims of the ultimate violence which
is mortality, so they’ve all been erased. But in order for them to resist that
erasure they have to move in the space. So there’s an empty space, where
nothing happens, where I have been erased, then there’s the body that moves in
the space, that insists on its own individual, specific narrative moving through
the space.

So in terms of what Mandla told me to do with this piece, I had to wait quite a
while because they were struggling with the different bits. I’m kind of like a
midwife, so I watch and listen to see what kind of thread they’re trying to pull
out. I have strong feelings as well which I try to come in with but I do a lot of
listening in terms of trying to find images and ways to make clear what it is
they’re thinking, and using language to pull out those threads.

Faniswa: About the set, ideally we would like to have a whole long road and have
people coming out from the ground, but theatrically, it’s not possible. We just
don’t have the budget. So the screen is -
Mandla: - the dead seams. One day I want Faniswa to be underneath there,
buried under the soil, so when the audience comes in, you just see this [limb
sticking out]…

Faniswa: I think the screen is like an extension of the road but also it’s a way of
translation and bringing images, because we [wanted] to have the images on the
floor but because we have actors on the stage, and lighting wise it doesn’t work.

Mandla: What does it look like? (to audience)

Audience: It looks like a gateway. Like cow skin,

Cast member: The thumb becomes a substitute for when the mother is not there.
And for my character, her mother died along the road, so my thumb sucking is
for me trying to comfort myself and using the same thing for hiking because it’s
the only thing I can do.

Faniswa: the healer’s wound is the fact that she didn’t actually have time to take
care of her own wounds because all the other people’s stories kept coming.