Local youth arts group Siphumelele Arts Production recently did so well at the Department of Cultural Affairs and Sports’ Arts Festival in Oudtshoorn that it has been invited back to the town to perform next February.
With passion in his voice, his eyes closed, Siphumelele’s Zukisa Tamle talks about the play, Ingcwaba Lomkhwetha, directed by him and a few friends.
“The play is about a family that has an ancestral calling, even if they don’t practise their culture and rituals,” he said. He speaks of how these tensions are embodied in the son of the family, who is sent to initiation school with a view to focusing him, an attempt that fails. “The play is intended to educate and inform the greater community on the importance of culture among African people,” Tamle explains.
He uses the statement “Art is life” to contextualise his own life’s journey, explaining how he had always been the “odd-one-out”, compared to other children he grew up with, because his interests were different from theirs.
According to Tamle, the group is motivated and boasts scriptwriter Mncedisi Nani as an associate. “He is the experienced one who has written award-winning plays,” he says.
Ingcwaba Lomkhwetha was also performed at the local Dutch Reformed church.
“The play was amazing,” Tamle said. “I think everyone was energised and grew in terms of performance, and it was the first time the community saw what we were actually doing.”
Tamle, who studied drama at Boland College, at its Caledon campus, also put a drama group together. “My drama lecturer saw that I had a passion for the performing arts, and this is what motivated me to get my friends together to start a group,” he said.
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