NOKWANDA NCWANE
Pretoria - Ahead of the local government election, the State Theatre in Pretoria will show Mr President, a production that highlights the socio-political issues affecting the marginalised groups in South Africa.
According to the State Theatre, the academic research-based Mr President intends to become a voice for the voiceless whose basic rights are and have been neglected for more than 25 years and will show from October today to 17.
Mr President was produced by the State Theatre and adapted from ethnographic researcher and theatre maker Bongani Nicholas Ngomane’s thesis “The Invisible Faith in Democracy Ekas’lam – An Exploration of Public Ethnography as a form of protest in an Arts-Based Methodology.
Written by Ngomane and directed by Tshepang Moticoe and Dr Karina Lemmer, Mr President follows a postmodern style composition that exhibits still and moving images to illustrate the conditions that suppress the mindset of abantu base kas’lam.
Ngomane said Mr President questions the greater period of a democratic zeitgeist that was not serving its people.
He added that Mr President was a creative exploration that problematised the South African democratic system that fails to serve the marginalised.
“The set and sound are applied as installations that depict the ‘institution’, against which a journey into the consequences faced by the marginalised unfolds. All creative choices stem from evidence gathered during a creative research project and our goal was to generate a multi-dimensional immersive experience.
“To this end a combination of elements, physical expression, text, voice, sound, music and set is applied in an attempt to honour the complexity of the themes explored and the reality of those who live it.”
The academic researcher also added that they hope that when the minority are brought into the exclamations of the majority a recognition and platform to voice out communally will be created for those who have suffered the erosion of the democratic zeitgeist from unrectified paths of history.
“We can no longer afford silence without productive progression,” said Ngomane.
Pretoria News