South Africa’s National Arts Festival (review)

South Africa’s constitution is one of the world’s most inclusive, protecting its citizens’ rights to racial, linguistic, gender, and sexual-preference freedoms. While the law guarantees such rights, the country is still plagued by an AIDS pandemic, the highest rape statistics in the world, and rampant homophobia. Fifteen years into this young democracy, the thirty-fifth annual National Arts Festival threw a ten-day coming-out party replete with a range of physical and figurative bodies and their complex stories of identity. Central to many of this year’s offerings was the queering of the multiple narratives of belonging of South Africa’s varied populations.

The jewel in the festival’s crown was Jeremy Crutchley’s remarkable portrayal of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf in the Baxter Theatre’s South African premiere of Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife, directed by Janice Honeyman. “Ich bin ein transvesteit,” Charlotte teased, smoothing her hands over the black headscarf and single strand of pearls that marked her distinctly masculine body as feminine. As s/he told her tale of surviving two repressive forces, the Nazis and the Stasi, we journeyed with her through questions of contradictory accounts of history, complicity with authorities, what human beings do in order to survive repressive regimes, and the courage of an individual to stand against the grain to make safe spaces for others like her. The final image of the play is a photograph of Charlotte as a young boy between two lionesses, an interloper between masculine and feminine, between the Nazis and the Stasi. The image resonated in contemporary South Africa as a potent emblem of the country’s position between its own shifting regimes, and Crutchley’s luminous, playful, and ballsy Charlotte opened the discussion of gender performativity at the festival . . . and beyond.

While gay male voices have been heard at the festival before, thanks in large part to the committed vision of Peter Hayes and the Hearts & Eyes Theatre Collective, lesbian voices—and lesbian bodies— came out in force this year. Ncamisa! The Women, directed by Hayes and starring newcomer Pam Ngwabeni, was a bold one-woman show about coming out as a black lesbian in the township of Khayelitsha. Using soccer as her metaphor, the lithe, boyish actress played with the audience as she footed the ball, coyly inviting us into her world— a world where girls kissed (ncamisa in isiXhosa), where she strutted her sexuality with confidence, and where, guiding two handheld work lights over her face and body, she sang, “One day I’ll grow up and be a beautiful woman. . . . But for today I am a child, for today I am a boy.”

In this heartfelt story of love, loss, pride, and terror, Ngwabeni tackled the dangers and challenges that lesbians face in the townships, from social stigma and misunderstanding to “corrective rape” and, in particular, the 2006 murder of her friend, Zoliswa Nkonyana. As she slowly began to undress herself, Ngwabeni also spoke of Eudy Simelane, who on 28 April 2008 was “found in a creek in a park in Kwa Thema. . . . She has been gang-raped, and brutally beaten before being stabbed twenty-five times in the face, chest, and legs.” The issue of corrective rape was also taken up by lesbian sangoma (traditional healer) Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde, who shared her experiences of dancing like a woman and slaughtering like a man at the Spirituality and Sexuality Series of the festival: “I was born a lesbian . . . and

Jeremy Crutchley (Charlotte von Mahlsdorf) in I Am My Own Wife. (Photo: Harold Gess.)

I was called to be a sangoma as a lesbian,” she said. “We are not something to be fixed.” Ngwabeni’s performance echoed Nkabinde’s rebel yell, and as she enumerated multiple cases of violence toward lesbians, she painstakingly washed herself clean in a tub of water, singing to Lucinda Williams’s “Unsuffer Me.”

Ngwabeni ended the piece with a love scene, dressing up in her hip-hop ball...