Directing
University of Cape Town - 2009
“Shakespeare meets Fight Club” - Zane Henry
UCT Drama Department and Yawazzi Theatre Productions will be staging an exciting new adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet at The Little Theatre from the 16 of May 2009. This new adaptation brings the text closer to the experiences of our time, where action becomes confused with inaction. For Drama students, it is an experience to witness a modern concept approach to Elizabethan theatre. For English students, it offers insight into different areas of Shakespeare’s themes and for all it is an event of theatrical intrigue.
This new adaption works on the idea of multiple Hamlets, his inner conflict made tangible as his disparate drives fight amongst themselves to control Hamlet’s soul, destiny, and the state of Denmark. The text is restructured as a retelling, highlighting the struggle for power, and the moments when Hamlet’s decisions are made (or deferred) leading him to his fatal future. Student will get to experience the power of Shakespeare, as we explore some of the possibilities of the human condition.
Design: Jon Keevy / Costume Design: Leigh Bishop / Lighting Design: Daniel Galloway
June 14, 2011 - Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts, University of Cape Town
Sampling - a term borrowed from music – using a section of a sound recording as an instrument in a new recording of a song
Live Performance Sampling – a GIPCA sponsored enquiry – using a section(s) of previously performed live performance to create a new live performance piece
University of Cape Town - 2007
Director
On an ordinary evening, a woman is putting the last touches on her makeup. She discovers that she can’t move away from the mirror, she can’t stop looking at herself and hating her face. Her date gets impatient. All of a sudden, a female army from the 1920s invades her room and reveals a wooden sculpture that resembles face of a dictator. Soon, what was her room is filled with a soldier without a face, a lover with a scared face, two people with the same face, an emperor, prostitutes, Greeks… Are all these people attempting to tell her something?
In Wounds to the Face, Howard Barker targets the one thing that is central to our relationship with the outside world, our face. It is after all the first thing we see when meeting someone, and also the first thing they see in us. It is something we do not have much choice in creating, and can never hide. Through a series of scenes, comic, tragic, switching across centuries and various places, and through his powerful use of poetic language, Barker goes on to explore how our face and our perception of other faces can influence every facet of human behaviour.
Photos by Rob Keith.
