In the Book of Rebellations, Monageng Motsabhi and Kgafela oa Magogodi give an imaginative take on our reality
DIRECTOR Monageng Motsabhi and spoken word poet Kgafela oa Magogodi started hashing out the idea that led to allegoric fantasy Book of Rebellations, years ago.
“We wanted to tell a story,” said Kgafela oa Magogodi about that first conversation.
“We didn’t know how, the how was not yet clear. It was just ‘can we tell a story of this book that has to do with the powers that be’. That’s what we were going around, the book of rebellations is something that comes from a long time ago,” explained Monageng Motshabi.
They kept on working on the idea while both of them continued working in various capacities and spaces from the US (Motshabi directed a reading of Omphile Molusi’s The Promised Land of Balalatladi at the Kennedy Centre in Washington) to Joburg (where Motshabi directed Sizwe Banzi is Dead for the Market Theatre in 2011 and oa Magogodi is a part time Wits film lecturer).
They started rehearsals with “a big fat script” which was whittled down as the weeks went along right up to three days before their first run at the Soweto Theatre in the middle of last year, with four actors and two musicians.
“We were trying to find what is this thing really about. As soon as you have actors in the room, you know, you can see what works and what doesn’t fly.
“This time, coming into rehearsal again, we had a new performer, so that also changed how we looked at the play because then we’re exposed to some of the holes and challenges,” said Motshabi about their current run at Artscape.
Set in a made-up world called Kanana , which is a land of promised freedom ruled by a benevolent ruler with a super tight grip on practically everything, in 2024 the play features a young rebel leader who wants to remind the people of their past.
Oa Magogodi, a spoken poet when he’s not co-directing plays or lecturing, says he doesn’t distinguish between writing poetry or theatre work, they’re just different spaces: “The protaganist occupies that space where his spoken language is heightened essentially, whether you call it poetry or whatever, it is poetic.”
They eventually settled on using English and Setwana with bits of street lingo for effect.
“it’s a ‘use your imagination’ kind of space,” Motshabi described the minimal set. “We borrow largely from the tradition of sitting around a fire and listening to one person telling you a story, so the piece is built in that mode.
They settled on allegoric fantasy rather than presenting it as a straightforward political comment because they didn’t think that creating a mirror was enough.
“What we are interested in is creating a picture that opens the door to the potential in us. We are not only reflecting in the play the darkness out there, we are also looking at where it can go. Also, not just what beauty we can express and attain, but what is out there in the world of the imagination.
“It is essential not to get trapped in telling people what they already know. Everyone knows what the real picture is, where the mess is, that’s clear. We’re not interested in being a newspaper voice,” said Motshabi.
Oa Magogodi adds that art being a terrain for play they want to foreground how the imagination is used to reach for things that aren’t visible. “How else do you escape conditions of mental incarceration,” he asked.
“The setting is a place that is tomorrow. That gives us an opportunity to travel in the head so that we are not burdened by the need for realism. As an artist, that is a cumbersome thing, to reflect a reality that we don’t all agree on,” said oa Magogodi.
Book of Rebellations is currently on at ArtsCape Arena until February 21.