Sunday Tribune

‘Mentoring will ensure the future of the arts in South Africa’

KEDIBONE MODISE kedibone.modise@inl.co.za

TELEVISION and theatre practitioner James Ngcobo is leaving the Market Theatre after nearly a decade to join the Joburg Theatres (JCT) as the newly appointed artistic director.

Ngcobo will be responsible for developing and implementing an artistic vision for JCT’S 10 spaces at the Joburg Theatre, Roodepoort Theatre and Soweto Theatre, including the newly refurbished Jabulani Amphitheatre.

In a recent conversation, Ngcobo said this new role will afford him opportunities to continue his vision of producing indigenous productions for audiences that wouldn't normally go to the theatre.

“The thing is, for me, when I curate work in these spaces, I am very cognisant first of all of the fact that it can never be about James. It’s never about me, it’s about: Who are we programming for? It’s about the constituencies that the programme has to speak,” says Ngcobo.

“The other thing that I’m very cognisant of is that the theatre is a very beautiful space to give visibility to everybody that is in this country.

“If you track the kind of stuff that I was doing, when I was at the Market Theatre, I created the visibility of the theatre in indigenous languages, where we did theatre ka Setswana, ka Sepedi, ka Sesotho, and put the same effort into the theatre ya dipuo tsa rona (our indigenous languages), as we do theatre in English, because they are languages, I put them all on a pedestal.

“This is why I’m not even a fan of the word ‘vernacular’, it's all languages, and what I have learnt from that thinking is that each of these languages represents a slice of life in this country.

“And they bring bums on seats of people who maybe at some point had never, ever come to the theatre. They come because there is something that echoes them, that looks like them, that sounds like them.

“And that is the humility that always informs every decision that I get to take to just say, we are in this country, theatres should really echo how diverse we are,” he said.

Commenting on his new role, Ngcobo says he is not naive about how difficult the journey is that he’s about to embark on.

“It’s a daunting task. You know, to be able to programme 10 spaces and look after theatres that are in three different pockets of the city, that speak to different constituencies, and also be able to look at these theatres and say each one has always done this. But why can’t he do that?

“That is the question that I’m wanting to constantly be asking myself with a clear acceptance that this theatre has always produced this type of stuff. But what is stopping it from doing that other thing?” Ngcobo asks.

He says mentoring young creatives is what will keep the arts alive for centuries to come.

“Besides creating, my other passion, which is something that absolutely drives me, that I will have, no matter where I am … is mentorship. In the nine years that I was an artistic director at the Market, I had 45 young directors that I mentored.”

Ngcobo will take on his new role as the artistic director of the Joburg Theatres from July 1.

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2022-06-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-06-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

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