Review: Holding space in Circle Song with Ashley Dowds

What: Circle Song Written and performed by: Ashley Dowds Directed by: Caroline Calburn Sound design: Ashley Dowds and Connor Dowds Lighting design: Frans Zunguze and Caroline Calburn Where: Theatre Arts, Cape Town When: October 14, 15, 2025

“You can’t remember if you can’t imagine and can’t imagine if you can’t remember”, reflects Ashley Dowdsin Circle Song, which he has written and performs in. I saw this beautiful piece of theatre at Theatre Arts, last night, October 15, 2025. It was the 2^nd performance of a two night run. Hopefully this special piece of theatre will return for a longer season soon. Circle Song recently received a Silver Ovation award at 2025 National Arts Festival, Makhanda and that award is highly deserved for this meditative offering in which Ashley Dowds holds space for all of us as he immerses us in his stories of re-remembering threads of his family and its connections to each other.

The season at Theatre Arts was presented in the round, with the audience sitting in a circle, around the performance space, what looks like a chalk circle, but is actually formed from flour (as in baking). The use of flour is emblematic for me, of the alchemy of baking, the magic of transmuting flour which looks like dust into dough; into bread, cakes. For me sitting around the magic circle, a fired up circle, there is a sense of breaking bread together, that is metaphorically speaking. Not only is Dowds holding space and honouring the legacy of his family and its collective memory but we the audience is holding space as we sit around him, around the circle, containing him.

Circle Song is a non-linear mediation which circles and wraps itself around its stories. In Circle Song, Dowds circles around the genesis of his family tree – with prompts – circling those who left England and Ireland for Africa. There are his parents – how they met – and how the circle closes – with them/ It’s not just about archiving but how we remember and re-member through the stuff that happens in families and how that shapes the way we recall and hold memories – because of what happens to us, which shifts our perception, our brains.

On that note, when Dowds was 24 and in the Army (SADF), his mother awoke from major brain surgery and in her mind she was 15 and in 1952. The brain is a wondrous organ and in Circle Song, Dowds has embodied a brain like landscape, with the electrical currents of his stories, forming synapses and flickers through the space. He circles around the body of memory, connecting himself and us as we sit in the space, sparking off images, letters, stuff in the space.

Circling back to the term “holding space”, the term has been used a lot recently as an invitation particularly for those on social media to respect the views of others. Being present and providing a non-judgmental space is core to the term which apparently gestated with psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s 1960s concept of “holding environment,” which he used to describe the support – physical and emotional that a mother provides for her your young. In 2015, the term was extended by writer, Heather Plett in a blog post, as “holding space”. There was the invitation to be present for others, without judging and “fixing” them. Beyond being a beautifully crafted and multi-layered piece of theatre, Circle Song invites the audience be present, non-judgmental and to sift through its own memories. We feel the physical particles of the flour circle, as Dowds sifts through his act of re-membering.

At the performance that I attended last night, the audience was invited to stay and sit in the circle with Dowds and share insights and their own memories if that was what was sparked by the show. At the start of the show, Dowds invited us to close our eyes and become immersed in the act of “retrieving.” The invitation: “Where are you from? Who are you? Try and remember the face of your mother, the face of your father. Step back a generation – behind your mother is her mother – behind your father is his father … Is there a story that connects you …”

Emotionally that is a lot and as remarked by an audience member, not all of us have memories of our ancestors. Connections, neurons have been lost. Circling back to Circle Song, through the impeccably crafted and nuanced narrative and seamless direction by Caroline Calburn, articulation by sound, props, light and shadow, we are held in the space with Dowds, as flickering embers in a neural body of memory. This intricate piece of theatre needs to be seen more than once. One of the attendees last night, watched for her second time. It is an intense, intimate and uncomfortable piece of theatre at times as it fires up synapses of memory. It is a piece which is likely to spark memories or re-membering -retrieving perhaps what has been discarded. That means reaching deep into our own brains. 

Bravo to Ashley Dowds, director Caroline Calburn, the creative team and all the first/early directors who have been involved in plotting the circuits of Circle Song – text and its emanation in a theatre space, in the round.

✳ Ashley Dowds in Circle Song, which he has written and performs in. Pic supplied.