LANGA, Billy; MOKGONYANA, Mahlatsi; NUR GONI, Marian (ed.); HOPKINS, Sam (ed.)
Tswalo

From the multi award-winning Theatreduo comes Tswalo, a celebration of the art of solo performance. Tswalo, re-published by iwalewabooks in 2019, entwines poetry and physical storytelling to interrogate the rules that govern life on earth, such as power, creation, politics, connection, and intuition – the performer’s expression of his “source.” It is the product of a creative collaboration: written and performed by Billy Langa with direction, dramaturgy and design by Mahlatsi Mokgonyana in collaboration with award-winning composer and sound designer John Withers.

Tswalo is the winner of the Standard Bank Ovation Award, Cape Town Fringe Fresh Performer Award and Cape Town Fringe Fresh Creative Award for Directing, and has toured  South Africa, Namibia, Germany and Scandinavia. Tswalo is a body of poems constructed to fragment a narrative that is carried in both physicality and voice. It is placed in a timeless space of existence, which explores the primary themes of being, chaos and beauty, blood and birth, love and war in the same frame.

Tswalo combines ritual, physical storytelling and heightened text to create new distinct theatrical language as a way of reconstructing and deconstructing the orthodox and the traditional chronology of telling stories. “This is what theatre should, and can be”, the critics of Weekend Special wrote. iwalewabook is proud to present the re-publication of the work, with a foreword by Nondumiso Msimang. [publishers’ note]

Published by iwalewabooks, 2021
Performance / Literature