Our Journey to Grahamstown
It all started as a joke. The idea of doing Woza Joshua was first muttered in Zimbabwe sometime in December last year. I was leaving my country to come to the University of Witwatersrand to complete my Masters degree under Drama for Life and so I wanted to do it as a goodbye performance for my fans in my country.
I began the job of adapting the Woza Joshua script with my former girlfriend Confidence Mushakarara and I was going to act it out with Zenzo Nyathi, popularly known as Mzambane in acting circles in Zimbabwe. We did not get enough time to do the script and so we cancelled the whole thing and I focused on my journey here.
Still, I missed acting on stage. I had done television acting for so many years and it was getting monotonous. I needed something new, something more challenging like stage drama.
So last semester I asked Clayton Ndlovu if he was willing to take on Woza Albert with me to which he responded in the affirmative. We adapted the play further to reflect more accurately our situation in Zimbabwe.
Being a multi-talented man, Clayton contributed immensely to the adaptation of the play. We found not only a willing director in Warren Nebe, but an excited one who immediately warmed to the idea and pretty soon we would be headed for Grahamstown for the very first time. This of course evoked both the feeling of excitement and nervousness. It was going to be a big challenge and a big achievement for us.
The rehearsal process was not an easy one. Every time we met the script changed as new ideas came up. It was an overwritten script meaning that it had too much dialogue and little action, it was boring to us so we felt that it was going to be boring to the audience.
Dances for instance came at a later stage and yet we felt we needed to stylise the script more and move even further away from realism. Clayton is a natural dancer and was very helpful in this regard. We went back to our scenes and deconstructed them to speak through song and dance.
I guess I was not too bad in getting the movements right. It was exciting; it reminded me of my adolescent days when I danced Isitshikitsha, a Zimbabwean traditional dance for the Ndebele speaking people, and got a five cent prize from a member of the audience. Five cents then was quite some money in Zimbabwe. No one ever imagined that one day we would use one trillion dollars.
With our busy first semester schedule, I must say that rehearsal time was not adequate but we still soldiered on and got to the National Arts Festival. Oekeditse Phala, our Botswana colleague in Drama for Life joined us, assisting with management. He also assisted immensely in the play making process, coming up with brilliant ideas. We shall forever be grateful to him for that.
The journey by train to Grahamstown was very exciting as we spoke all the way there sharing experiences from Botswana and Zimbabwe. Phala had us in stitches with his parodying stunts. The guy is good at parodying Indians. Clayton and I just enjoyed ourselves and laughed our lungs out.
We eventually arrived in Grahamstown and what immediately caught my attention were the posters and fliers all over the place. Every production was trying to draw the attention of the audience to their plays. One play had fancy posters all over the place, I wondered if that really worked. True I did look at the posters myself but what I realised was that I was attracted more to those that had public figures like Sello Maake ka Ncube also known as Daniel in the local soapie Scandal.
I am still not so sure if the posters on their own would pull audiences. I felt that a more aggressive publicity drive was needed. There were those who took their works to the sundowner concerts where they performed parts of their plays for free for purposes of publicity. We felt that the sundowner concerts either made or unmade a performance. It was risky taking a play there. It worked for some though.
Our first performance was not one of the best. We were tense and it being our debut performance, we were not so sure of our audiences. It was well received though.
We had to pay the price of passive publicity when we performed to two people on the second day. We got a thumbs-up from Warren though for being generous. He said that we had done justice to the two audience members as we had given it our best.
The next three days were well attended. It was exciting to get to the end and we were to leave the following day. We got encouraging media reviews especially from Cue television and Cue newspaper who felt that Woza Joshua was a hilarious and brave comedy that was a must watch. Mail and Guardian online gave us a fair review as well.
We are back and proud of our achievements. We are grateful to Drama for Life and to our director, Warren Nebe and the programme manager, Munyaradzi Chatikobo. Cati Muller, Phala Oeketitse, Lonwabo Mavuso and Lidija Marelic were also very supportive. Before we knew it, we had earned ourselves the nickname, ‘The Joshuas’ and we could not say no to it.
Woza Joshua just began and we intend to make it bigger. We think that it would be unfair for us to abandon the concept now because of the issues it treats. The play looks at serious life issues about Zimbabwe and abandoning it would amount to sleeping on duty.
It turned out to be a calling as it unfolded and like Jon Blair, a multi-award-winning film and television producer, I can say in closing, “That it was by living outside the country of my birth that I could serve it best.”