A unique, collaborative journey about loss, memory and intimacy, The Cenotaph of Dan Wa Moriri, which travels to Grahamstown this week, all started with the death of Tony Miyambo’s father. “He moved me endlessly,” says the young Wits drama graduate.
After his death, it was as if the world moved on too quickly and he felt an almost desperate need to hold on. “I felt a panic when I believed after some time that I was losing his touch and his voice,” says the son who was saddened by the loss that didn’t seem to affect his mother and sister as it did him.
The women had been estranged the last years before his death and Miyambo was the one who had lived with him at the age of 18. The detail seemed to be fading which caught him unawares. It wasn’t as if his dad’s death was sudden. He had a stroke and was in a coma for a few months with Miyambo jr spending many hours with his father reading from books or the Bible. “It was an intense time for me and my father,” he recalls.
After his dad’s death, it was time for him to study and he knew he wanted to do drama, but his mom couldn’t afford the fees. She urged him to study IT first and once she had saved, he could go to drama school – which he did. In his third year, when they were tasked to do a solo work with a personal narrative, he knew the time was right.
“(Actor/director) Gerard Bester was my supervisor and also a lecturer in clowning,” he explains. Those two things combined to unlock and unfold a personal story about a father-son relationship cut too short. For the son it was a tragic event because of the reality of his father’s death. “He was holding on to the memories,” says Bester, but together they coaxed out a narrative that dealt with the trauma for the son.
Last year it was commissioned by Gita Pather, director of Wits Theatre, to be part of a the inaugural So Solo Festival, and Bester and Miyambo brought writer William Harding on board to cut down on their reams of writing.
From this emerged a sensitive, finely crafted monument to the memory of Miyambo’s father, Daniel Rasenga Miyambo.
“I was compelled to tell this story,” says Miyambo and now he has the chance to travel further afield with the production, the first Wits play to be part of the National Arts Festival Main platform.
This ongoing journey which started when Miyambo lost his father in 2007 and struggled to come to terms with the void that was left in his life, is an ongoing tribute to the man he wishes to honour: “Waking up each day after (the funeral) was painful; I could still vividly recall the tone of his voice, the colour of his eyes and the feeling of his touch. It haunted me, he lived everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Our life together became an endless loop and the years began to strip away the detail of this man from my mind. My father was a hair stylist, he used to touch people’s heads and make them look beautiful. That had to count for something.”
He felt a duty to his father to keep his memory alive, but from the start was baffled by the battle of translating this personal tale to affect the lives of others. That was Miyambo’s quest. He felt compelled to tell the story but didn’t think others would care about this Ekurhuleni hairdresser.
But Bester disagreed: “The sincerity of a personal narration echoes and magnifies itself in the context of the universal, allowing an individual history to reflect in the audience a recognition of the need of claiming one’s own history.”
That’s what they managed to uncover. Bester, Miyambo and Harding reconstructed a personal history and narrative to create a poignant, sincere rendering that critic Adrienne Sichel described as “a mobile, theatrical, tombstone honouring the life and legacy of his parent”.
“It’s about that funeral speech and the things you didn’t say,” says Bester.
And for Miyambo, the play has become a living conversation with his father. “He touched my hair and moved my life,” he says.
• He will also be starring at Grahamstown in Kafka’s Ape based on A Report to an Academy, an intriguing interrogation on identity and what it means to be human. Directed by Phala O Phala, Miyambo plays Red Peter from Thursday to Sunday.
The Cenotaph of Dan Wa Moriri runs from July 7 to 9 at The Hangar. Then both plays become part of the Wits 969 Festival which showcases Grahamstown plays in Gauteng from July 15 to 26.