Commission Continua (Theatre, South Africa)

Am trying something slightly different - let's see a play from the Singapore Fringe Festival together! Please buy tickets beforehand here. Let's meet 715p at Toast Box Esplande, for the 8pm show on Saturday. The performance will be an hour long, with a post-show dialogue.

Cross-posted with SG Artsy Fartsy
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Bright Maluleke—played by Tony Bonani Miyambo from Kafka’s Ape—is an employee who copies and archives official documents from the commissions. He does his best just to stick to his brief and ignore the content of the files but this proves difficult when faced with all these pages giving an account of the most critical and catastrophic moments in South Africa’s history. In the frugal setting of a photocopier, a microphone, and a loop station, he begins to give vent to his annoyance with South African society’s struggle for real change and reconciliation.
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https://lessgoodidea.com/new-gallery-12
Conceptualised by Tony Miyambo and Phala O. Phala and performed by Miyambo, the play traces the history of some of South Africa’s commissions of enquiry –The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Marikana Commission of Inquiry being two of the most infamous ones.
Miyambo plays the part of a dowdy, ineffectual office worker who, like SA’s own veneration of the historical archive, is somewhat obsessed with paper and what it represents.
“180million tons of paper used per year, R200million spent per commission. Yes, our inquiries are so important that we have to commission them. We record them and then we print them for our mental landfills and then we repeat the chorus of our traumas,” he says in a seemingly throw-away line early on.
If Commission Continua is slow to start it’s only because what Miyambo’s character builds up to is some of the most overwhelming and heart-breaking theatre across the Season.
Live looped audio mirrors the monotony of government inquiry – an endless and impersonal cycle of clearing throats and ‘yes chair, no chair’ answers – while Miyambo’s own performance, his embodiment of the extraordinary pain of seemingly ordinary people, cuts right through the bureaucracy of it all, rendering tangible the enduring traumas of the past and present.
“Where is the voice of the victim?” he asks, amidst a series of voices endlessly sounding out and crashing down all around us. “Ceasefire!” he screams, in an all-too-familiar register of fear and panic. Finally, as a photocopier drones on in the dark – capturing, documenting, archiving – we are left to wonder: How much more paper will we have to sift through?
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“Commission Continua is a powerful and affecting production. Miyambo succeeds in delivering a complex concept with care.”
–Nkgopoleng Moloi, The Critter
“Bonani Miyambo is terrific and deservedly gets one of the strongest ovations of the night”
–Teresa Guerreiro, Culture Whisper
“A devastating one-hander that emphasises how the culpability for historical and recent crimes perpetrated against the South African people has become buried under mountains of paperwork.”
–Chris Thurman, Business Live
Artist Information
Noma Yini Pty Ltd
Noma Yini is a Johannesburg-based company that is passionate about harnessing the power of story and theatre to inspire, educate, and entertain. They create innovative productions with a global footprint. Work that not only entertains but sparks meaningful conversations and fosters a deeper understanding of ourselves and our world.
Phala Ookeditse Phala
Director
Phala Ookeditse Phala was the animateur at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, an interdisciplinary incubator space for the arts, based in Maboneng, Johannesburg. He is a multi-award-winning ‘storiyer’ whose works have won awards in South Africa, the United States of America, the Czech Republic and Australia. He holds a Masters in Dramatic Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. His works champion emotional and psychologically-stimulating storytelling as a uniquely African aesthetic. His focus and interest are on methodologies of making and creating work in ways that collapse and disrupt conventional norms.
Tony Bonani Miyambo
Playwright & Performer
Tembisa-born Tony Bonani Miyambo is a BA Dramatic Arts graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He currently works as a freelancer in the television, film and theatre industries. His credits include numerous award-winning theatre productions, some of which have toured the United States of America, the Czech Republic, Netherlands and the United Kingdom. His highlights include performing his one-man show The Cenotaph of Dan Wa Moriri at the Market and Playhouse theatres. Winner of the Marta award for Best Actor at the SETKÁNÍ/ENCOUNTER festival in Brno, Czech Republic, Tony was also the recipient of the Brett Goldin bursary in 2014 and studied with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford upon Avon, United Kingdom.