To heal the world, one dream at a time

Something deeply human happens in the audience when a performer takes a universal tale of pain and complexity and weeps it out onstage.

Mpume Mthombeni, co-director of Empatheatre and a writer and performer in The Last Country, at the Market Theatre from May 15, understands what moves a story-audience forever. She spoke to Wanted Online between rehearsals.

“I collapse backstage after performing work like this. The emotion is hectic, overwhelming. Sometimes I take imphepho oil after a show, to beg my ancestors to give me space to breathe, because the characters I represent are not me. They use my body,” she speaks of her debriefing process.

Each time she performs in a new venue, she also approaches the ancestors by walking about the city where it will take place.

“I must introduce my ancestors to the space. They need to meet up with the ancestors of the place, and the ancestors of the audience members. They must see we are here in peace.”

It’s not easy blending the commercial needs of a theatre with her energy. “Sometimes I need to perform two shows in a day. It’s very difficult spiritually.”

Born in 1971 in Umlazi, KwaZulu-Natal, Mthombeni was the daughter of traditional AmaZulu parents. Her mother worked as a domestic. But both her parents nurtured important dreams and talents in the arts — her father was an isicathamiya singer. Her mother was also endowed with a beautiful singing voice.

Mthombeni’s imperatives as a young girl were to be a wife and mother, but she was blessed with an understanding of the breadth of the world in the arts, and the kind of possibilities of life between the interstices of what society expects.

Performance grabbed her by her gut as a young teenager. She yearned to study the social sciences, but unsupported, she landed up working in a factory.   

And then, one day, a call for auditions in Ilanga newspaper, caught her attention. She was selected from over 100 people for a Playhouse production, and she went on to study dance under Lliane Loots at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. By 1994, she was onstage under the direction of Ellis Pearson and Bheki Mkhwane.

Fast forward to 2012 when she started working with theatre-maker Neil Coppen. It was her performance in Coppen’s Standard Bank Young Artist work Tin Bucket Drum of that year that first got the critical theatre community, locally and abroad, taking ardent notice of who she is and what she is doing.

Two years later, Coppen and Mthombeni were invited by the Durban University of Technology to facilitate an argument between mine owners and the community in Emfuleni. Kira Irwin of Urban Futures was instrumental in enabling this important conversation. It saw the community’s feelings, needs and priorities get heard.

“We liked how we worked together,” Mthombeni recalls. “Through our work, the people were able to come together amicably”, and thus, with the collaboration of educational sociologist and artist Dylan MacGarry, Empatheatre was born, blending empathy with the give-and-take space of the amphitheatre.

The work Isidlamlilo: The Fire Eater, featuring a performance by Mthombeni and workshopped writing by Coppen and Mthombeni, is the most recent Empatheatre production to have set audiences on fire, globally. Its impassioned and mystical tale weaves politics with fantasy, yielding a story and a character which is mind-blowing in her outward ordinariness and the massive secrets she carries under her skin, in her belly.

She laughs gutturally, at the question of how a production of this nature comes about. “It is a lot of work that combines oral histories, reading, understanding loopholes, working with archives and books. We get to research material in the university archives, which are not accessible to everyone. It’s very thorough and sacred and takes years. It also involves a call-and-response with the people who are involved. They must hear it.

“This intensity of research helps me a lot when it comes to my need to breathe life into these stories onstage. When we have read everything, I sit with the person and observe how they move, breathe, talk, so that when I tell their story, I can do it authentically.”

The Last Country features Mthombeni and Faniswa Yisa, Andile Vilakazi and Nompilo Maphumulo, representing women from Zimbabwe, Somalia, Congo and rural KwaZulu-Natal. The work blends testimony of 30 African women migrants. “Many stories are about men who are migrants, but less focus on women in this plight.”

Mthombeni describes the piece as a beautiful powerhouse. The audience is placed in a circle about the performers.

“This kind of work is moving and healing. I can see myself working like this for the rest of my life, but it’s strange: my dream as a youngster was to study the social sciences. I have returned to that dream from a different direction.”

The Last Country runs at The Market Theatre from May 15 to June 1.