KwaMagxaki artist Wezile Mgibe is charting his own path with dance, visuals and more in his multi-disciplinary shows, as Bay audiences will see when his new work opens at the Opera House next week.
The independent artist is presenting two separate shows: the new In These Streets – Bayeza! at the PE Opera House from September 5 to 8, and the first piece in the In these Streets series, Collecting Bodies, in Cape Town on September 6.
“I’ve got two projects on the go and I’m having sleepless nights!” he said last week, describing Bayeza! as primarily a contemporary Afro-fusion dance, with an art installation.
However, the multi-talented Mgibe, 28, prefers not to be labelled a dancer as he feels it mistakenly reduces a creative offering with many facets to only one discipline.
Art practitioner
Instead, the self-described “art practitioner” uses both performing and visual art as a tool for social change, flexing his muscles in improvisation and physical theatre along the way.
“I use audio, visuals, and movements as an offering, while I lead people to the experimental exploration of a live art journey,” he says.
There is as deeper message in his work, also, as he looks to find ways to “face and forgive various difficult realities in the non-verbal platform”.
Collecting Bodies for example looks at the trauma of missing “bodies” that never came back home.
It references South Africa in the early 1980s when people were abducted, stabbed and killed, and their bodies were never found. But Mgibe feels the tragedy is ongoing.
“South Africa – and Africa – is a crime scene and the people living on them are wounded. We are going through a lot.”
Bayeza! looks at the politics of displacement and the plight of refugees in South Africa, questioning site, culture and place.
“These are the narratives that the people on the post-apartheid streets of South Africa are going through,” Mgibe says.
“I was travelling from Port Elizabeth to Durban and went through Matatiele, which used to be part of the Eastern Cape and before that KwaZulu-Natal, but there are people who stay there who still speak of longing for the Free State.”
He says this led him to question who belonged where in South Africa.
“We have 11 official languages but am I welcome here?
“What are my origins? If I visit Namibia, as an African do I still belong, do I feel at home if I visit Namibia?”
Closer to home, his mother Ireen Mlondleni is from Queenstown, and his father James, from Jansenville, but Port Elizabeth is where he was brought up – Mgibe matriculated at Lungisa Senior Secondary School in KwaDwesi.
However, “most of my family are in the Western Cape and we have Afrikaans coloured in the mix” and he says he knows what it feels like to be an outsider.
He now lives between Nelson Mandela Bay and Cape Town.
“After school I went to Durban and auditioned for the Flat Foot Dance Company.”
It did not take long to find his niche and later he was a trainee on a Lotto funded development programme working with big names such as Isibaya star Bheki Mkhwane, which he said was an “amazing experience”.
Versatility is key
Having dipped his toes into musical theatre, Mgibe realises the importance of being not only able to dance but also to sing and act.
“That’s what you have to do when you audition but my strength is dance.
“My first break was with the Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative.
“They had a dance residency and it taught me how to think out of the box and not wait for work to come along. That’s when I started creating.”
In 2016, his world opened up when he was giving funding via the Visual Arts Network’s OpenLab programme to create and the result of this was the first In These Streets piece presented in Port Elizabeth last year.
Walmer drama teachers Sharon Rother and Linda-Louise Swain were among those who first lit his fire when he had a role in their production of Jack and the Beanstalk.
“My interest in the arts started when I auditioned for one of Sharon’s musicals and I fell in love with that,” says Mgibe, and both Rother and Swain have high praise for their former pupil.
Swain this week described In These Streets – Collecting Bodies as “magnificent”, commending Mgibe for creating new fields.
It has not always been easy, he admitted.
“There’s no one in the family who has an art background.
“I was studying mechatronics on a learnership at VW.
“When I left that I thought my dad would really hate me but my mom said ‘no, give him a chance’ and they did, and I’m happy.
"That kind of love where see the actions rather than hear the words is in my family.”
“My parents are very patient, they said ‘we don’t know what you are doing but we will give you time’. Sometimes it goes a month and I don’t have work but I still create.”
There are very few professionals in his niche in the Eastern Cape as the bigger cities offer more work opportunities.
“I’m loving it and I’m not going anywhere. Why? Because who is going to make it happen here if not me?
“It’s very difficult but I am happy that places like the Opera House support this, as well as ArtEC and the MBDA.
“The only way for it to get a platform is to be here and to do it so I go off and perform and come back and then I go off again.”
His next piece will deal with black love, called I’ve Heard a Lot About You.
“We need to educate about love, how to give and receive it, with stories that find their way into our households.
“Bad things take a seat at the table and there is no space for love or to talk about good things.“I will tell them in my narrative.”
He cites Sarafina! as an example, saying that playwright Mbongeni Ngema had “little time” for telling these kind of stories in the famous musical.
“Now it is time for us to change the narrative. Within the walls of Sarafina! there was love, there were love letters written in the apartheid days also, and my message is that ‘I am no longer going to give the oppressor a platform’.”
In These Streets - Collecting Bodies will be performed at Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town on September 6 at 6pm. The Opera House Dance Season of In These Streets – Bayeza! is from September 5-8 at the Barn Theatre.