Help Mothertongue take 2 shows to a Theatre Festival in India.

The Mothertongue Project's performance Walk and the play Womb of Fire have been invited to the 2018 International Theatre Festival of Kerala (ITFoK): Theatre of the Marginalised - Reclaiming the Margins. We were selected (unsolicited) from theatre festivals around the world and invited to perform our work! ITFoK is donating venue hire, accommodation and transport within India. All we need is airfares for our three company members Lukhanyiso Skosana, Rehane Abrahams and Sara Matchett; and cargo costs our set.

About our shows

Womb Of Fire : Premiered at the National Arts Festival 2017 to rve reviews and appreciative audiences. The show will next appear at the Woordfees 2018 and then enjoy a full run at the Baxter Theatre Centre in April/May 2018. Set against an episode from the Indian epic, The Mahabharata, the play interweaves personal narrative and contemporary realities with the lives of two women from the founding years of the Cape Colony to interrogate the Womb of Fire that birthed South Africa. We follow Grote Katrijn van Pulicat’s (1681-1683) journey across India to Batavia and then to Cape Town as the first female bandit slave; and we explore the briefly brutal life of Zara (1648-1671), a Khoekhoen servant woman who was violently punished posthumously by the VOC for the crime of suicide. Womb of Fire looks at the power of the performing female body to challenge the pornography of Empire, in the process decolonising and retrieving itself. The play reaches back and forward across time to reassemble the dismembered body allowing it to speak. It is a roar not a lament.

Walk: South Africa is a performance piece made by a group of South African artists in response to Maya Krishna Rao's The Walk. Rao created 'Walk' as a response to the gang-rape and murder of Jyoti Pandey. We decided, with Rao's permission, to create Walk: South Africa in early 2013, as a response to the gang-rape and murder of Anene Booysen. In April 2013 the company started to conceptualize a performed response to gender violence in South Africa. What has emerged is a series of performed installations, which involve the audience walking. The performed responses combine live and recorded performance and sound.

Walk South Africa - India 2017 will see three Mothertongue performers Lukhanyiso Skosana, Rehane Abrahams and Sara Matchett in a performance conversation with Maya Krishna Rao. In this version three womxn will traverse the margins and fringes, using their bodies' visibility to challenge the violences unsaid and unseen.