Yael Farber: A Celebration of Survival
The horrors of Apartheid inspired South African theater artists to share their stories with the world. Johannesburg-born playwright and director Yael Farber has been at the forefront of this theatrical movement, earning an international reputation for powerful works that articulate the experiences of ordinary South Africans. For the past six years, a company of five actors has toured the world in Farber's Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise, garnering acclaim and awards at every stop. At long last, the show has arrived in New York for a limited engagement at the Culture Project. Here, Farber shares her recollections of Amajuba's humble beginnings in a small South African town—and her joy in bringing it to American audiences.
In 2000 I arrived in Mafikeng, a tiny town in the dustbowl of South Africa's former homeland of Bophuthatswana, where I had been commissioned by an Arts Council to create a new theater piece. I had been assigned five resident actors whom—I hoped—would be willing to embark on a process of creating this new work culled from the experiences of their own lives. It was to this shattered landscape of memory that the actors agreed to return when we embarked on the creative process of Amajuba in Mafikeng almost seven years ago. Six weeks later, we opened to an audience that slowly accumulated well over an hour after we were set to begin. This was due both to the calm lack of emphasis placed on time in Mafikeng, as well as the fact that a black snake had been sighted entering the theater and naturally needed to be found. After an intensive search—which yielded nothing—we decided to "curtain up." Thus Amajuba was born.
South Africa is an extraordinary country in so many ways. Indeed, the relatively peaceful transition from almost half a century of brutal oppression to democracy was nothing short of miraculous. Yet beneath the hype of a country reborn lies the dark current of consequence. The emotional devastation of those years cannot be audited.
Creating a new piece of theater from scratch can be a grueling process. Directing an existing text—bringing a vision off the page and onto the stage—is challenging enough. Having to face a company of actors every morning with new pages of text for a relentless, yet absurdly short six-week creation period can feel downright masochistic at times, especially when those pages of text are wrought from the biographical details entrusted to you by those very actors upon whose life experiences the text is based. Each morning in the rehearsal room, you have to face down that "empty space" Peter Brook speaks of—the essential nothing needed for a new piece of theater to be "found". It is alchemy of sorts, this business of transforming silence and dry facts into theater. And often your days or weeks of effort turn up nothing worth keeping and the material stubbornly refuses to materialize. Yet with each process that yields a script in this way, it becomes increasingly impossible for me to find the rehearsal room as compelling in any other way.
Now in our seventh year of touring since this work was first created, Amajuba finds itself in New York, a city that has so recently suffered its own devastating blow. Amajuba was created as a proud acknowledgment of the inexplicable hope that continued to burn in South Africa's people despite the devastation of Apartheid's time. But it is also a work that we hope will speak to audiences with an immediacy that these uncertain times require. Beyond the expectation of Africa's role as victim in the international community, it is perhaps the sacred task of those who have suffered greatly to shine the light and show the way. It feels like a great time to be in New York for this—a great time to articulate that uncertainty can be transformative towards discovering where a community's true resilience lies and revealing its transcendent capacity for finding the light in the darkest of times.