Magetsi
After inflation and dollarization, mass exoduses and a newly constituted Government of National Unity, two men in overalls try to make sense of it all using nothing but a bucket and an old piece of carpet.
A newly returned woman’s search for a partner in Harare, a grandmothers campaign for electricity and lessons on how best to negotiate a bucket bath. This revolving disc of characters and situations unearths the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans, whose stories will never make it to the press.
This is it. This is Harare eclectic and electric. This is Magetsi. Written and performed by Two Gents Productions.
The Making Of
In April 2009, we travelled to our home, Zimbabwe, for the first time in seven years, to perform at the Harare International Festival of the Arts, armed with horror stories about how bad ‘the situation’ was. Having relied on The Guardian and other world press for updates on Zimbabwe, we really had no idea what to expect.
We laughed. We cried. And, in the last three weeks of our stay, we devised.
In a process that involved interviewing Zimbabweans from all walks of life, we used Harare as a filter to talk about the issues that we were burning to express – the process of returning from the Diaspora, Harare and its adoption of the US dollar and what effect that’s had on people’s lives; as well as lifting a lid on the experiences of different sectors of Zimbabweans during the recent process of change in the country.
We crafted these impressions and experiences into scenes and have now ended up with a very exciting show about an hour long. We like to think of it as a message/postcard from Zimbabweans to their counterparts abroad; an amalgamation of stories, monologues and vignettes that question everything you thought you knew about Zimbabwe. After two performances at the Harare Reps Theatre Upstairs, we performed it at the Market Theatre Lab in Johannesburg and it was wonderfully received. We now look forward to further performances in London and beyond.
No Comments »08/07/2009 by Arne