GULUVA staged at the 2023 National Arts Festival

The play was billed for all ages at the Princess Alice venue from 28 June to 01 July 2023. UPDATE caught up with Guluva’s cast during rehearsals before the festival.

Originally from Zamdela, Free State, Mphutlane wa Bofelo, one of the founding members of the National Writers Association of South Africa (NWASA), is a cultural worker, political theorist, and author of seven (7) published books.

Guluva is his second stage production after Beyond the boundaries; a dance-drama once shortlisted by the Performing Arts Council of Free State (PACOFS) for the Tsoho Community Festival in 2022.

By Serame Icebound Makhele

By the time you read this, Guluva, one-hander theatre play written by Mphutlane wa Bofelo, would have featured at the 2023 National Arts Festival in Makhanda.

Guluva is performed by a committed theatre activist, actor and facilitator with intensive formal training, Styx Mokejane, and directed by Mpho Lovinga; known for his leading role as Max Bua in a 2004 critically acclaimed South African film, Max and Mona. Except for film and television roles, Lovinga has acted in many theatre productions including The Madonna of Excelsior; the Zakes Mda novel adaptation. He has also worked as a facilitator in PACOF’s Incubator programme.

Guluva is crafted as is a fictionalised account of the life of the scriptwriter; particularly his experiences, observations, and ruminations in prison as a seventeen-year-old political prisoner in the 1980s.

It explores, according to the playwright, “the troubled and tormented soul, and creative imagination of a child who dives into the language of poetics, politics, philosophy, and psychology to deal with the trauma of having seen and experienced too many horrible things too early in life”.

It begins with a walk down memory lane and ends with reflections on the current realities of the marginalised and wretched of the earth. Bofelo says that many of his peers are unfortunately not as lucky as some of them who are able to find therapeutic outlets such as theatre and literature to deal with the pain of torture, imprisonment or the vicissitudes of exiled life experiences.

“Because they lack social networks and safe spaces to ventilate and express themselves, they find it hard to handle pressures that come as a result of disappointment due languishing in poverty and squalor in the so called postapartheid dispensation,” elaborates Bofelo.

“Many of them have resorted to alcohol abuse, crime and even ending their own lives as they are suffering from depression and many other mental illnesses.

He adds that black people as a collective are still battling with the legacies and continuities of the socio-economic, physical and psychological violence as unleashed by settler-colonialism and racial capitalism. He believes that these are the reasons why the play is relevant, as it is centred on the personal and social trauma of people who have experienced and are still experiencing structural and systematic violence.

On how the production contributes to the development of theatre and literature in this country, continent and the world, Bofelo claims that Guluva marks an interesting progression in the thematic and stylistic concerns of his plays.

“My previous works such as Beyond the Boundaries, a dance-drama which was once shortlisted by PACOFS for Tsoho Community Festival, centered on weaving dance, movement, poetry and visual arts to narrate stories focused on social, political and cultural consciousness,” he explains.

“On the contrary, Guluva is a performer-based play that relies on physical expression and the being of the actor, including his voice accompanied by music, sound and lights as aides.”

Bofelo further informs UPDATE that the play uses language of the subconscious and the architype in the form of character’s dreams displaying the robust conversations between the actor and his shadow.

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He says the play draws from both total and poor theatre. When questioned about the category in which the play is placed, he retorts: “Categories are exactly what we intend to smash and destroy. Formless and formatlessness are the essence of our intention for the play!”

Meanwhile, Styx Mokejane, the only actor in the production, says he finds the text very demanding to engage with. “Every time I have to work on this play it demands that I go through mental and spiritual cleansing process,” concedes Mokejane.

“If I am unclean, it means that the text and emotions would be too heavy to handle. The psycho drama or theatre as I would categorise it, needs one to be pure in order to deal with the direct torture it exposes to the actor through to the audience.”

He further asserts that Guluva is not an issue based drama but it deals with escalating, suffocating and dominant hatred experienced by South African citizens on a daily basis.

Preparations for the staging of the play was not without hassles. According to Bofelo, resources and logistics were major challenges during preparations for the festival. To offset these, the crew had to put up special shows to raise funds. “We are planning on staging a pre-festival performance for the Free State and Vaal-Triangle audiences to cover for some logistical needs such as accommodation,” Bofelo indicates.

He also acknowledges assistance received in this regard “We would also like to send a word of gratitude to Mr. Ketso Makume, The MEC of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs in the Free State - for his personal support with some of the logistics required to take the play to Grahamstown,”

Similarly, in 2022, Guluva was staged at the Funda Community College in Soweto during the commemoration of the 1976 Students Uprising before it headed to the Bat Center in Durban where it was received well by audiences – as was the case in Makhanda in 2022.