| What: Working Title, Live Art Weekend at Masambe Presents – The Soil Remembers When: October 1-3, 2026 (Thursday – Saturday) Venue: Masambe Theatre, Baxter Theatre Centre, Cape Town Time: 7pm. The programme is about 90 minutes. Bookings: Webtickets Direct booking link: https://baxter.uct.ac.za/events/live-art-masambe-soil-remembers Tickets: R120 full price, R100 students /seniors/group booking Curator: Carin Bester Featured artists: Live Art Kopano Mashike: Before the City, I Was Home Laphakade Myataza, Lutho Magubu & Kwakhanya Mboniswa: SANKOFA Siphesihle Nkantini: The line is dead (Calling the soil) Video Art Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, Justina Andreas and Bupe Chiwala: KINA Note: There will be a short Q & A session with the artists after the performances on Thursday October 1. Some of the performances will be taking place outside. Take something warm in case it is a chilly night Age restriction: No under 12s |
The Soil Remembers will be presented at Working Title’s Live Art Weekend, at the Baxter Masambe Theatre, October 1-3, 2026 (Thursday – Saturday). This is the 7th Live Art Weekend, curated by Carin Bester. Read on for more about the theme, artists and programme:
Working Title presents: Live Art at Masambe Theatre – The Soil Remembers
Belonging is not only where we live, but what lives in us. The Soil Remembers considers land as inherited memory. It asks what the earth holds after people have left, and how place continues to live through the body. In South Africa, our relationship with land continues to shape how we understand belonging and what it means to return.
The theme does not prescribe a single reading. It invites work that listens closely to the ground beneath us and questions what remains. Artists may follow what has been carried across generations, what draws us back, or how memory helps us find our way towards one another. It opens a space for work that seeks connection and solace through our relationship with the soil.
Featured Artists:
Live Art
Kopano Mashike: Before the City, I Was Home
Laphakade Myataza, Lutho Magubu & Kwakhanya Mboniswa: SANKOFA
Page Dina: Naturalised
Siphesihle Nkantini: The line is dead (Calling the soil)
Video Art
Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, Justina Andreas and Bupe Chiwala: KINA
Curated by Carin Bester
Dates: Thursday – Saturday, October 1-3 2026
There will be a short Q & A session with the artists after the performances on Thursday Oct 1
Venue: The Masambe Theatre at The Baxter Theatre Centre
Time: 19:00 Runs approximately 90min.
Tickets available at Webtickets
R120 Full Price – R100 Student / Pensioner / Group Booking
Please be aware some performances will take place outside.
No under 12s
Featuring artists:
- Kopano Mashike: Before the City, I Was Home
Before the City, I Was Home is a work about what happens when home disappears, but survival does not give you permission to stop.
It is rooted in the reality of a young woman trying to survive a city while carrying unemployment, housing insecurity, economic desperation and the quiet violence of having to make choices you never imagined you would have to make.
The work lives in the space between who we are and what survival asks us to become.
Before the City, I Was Home is not a story about being broken. It is a story about what we become when we survive being broken.
Sometimes the healer must die in fragments to become medicine.
Kopano Mashike is an internationally recognised South African performer, storyteller, curator and activist whose work spans theatre, film, radio and socially engaged art.
A trained actor and multidisciplinary artist, Kopano is known for using storytelling and performance to explore home, displacement, survival, identity, inequality and the lived realities of Black women in South Africa. Her practice is deeply rooted in activism and in creating work that gives voice to stories and communities that are often overlooked.
Kopano is a National Film & TV Awards nominee. She is also the founder of City Of Shacks, a socially engaged arts project centred on the stories, creativity and lived realities of people living in informal settlements.
- Laphakade Myataza, Lutho Magubu & Kwakhanya Mboniswa: SANKOFA
SANKOFA is a performance piece about young people who leave rural communities for the city and the distance that can grow between them and the places that once shaped their sense of belonging.
The work asks what happens when we move away from the land that remembers us, and what is lost when language, memory and connection begin to fade. Rather than presenting this as a moral lesson, SANKOFA considers the grief of becoming disconnected from where we come from, and the possibility of remembering, reclaiming and returning.
At its centre is a question of whether the soil can still call us home after change, distance and forgetting.
Laphakade Myataza is a musician and poet from Mthatha in the Eastern Cape. Growing up surrounded by the province’s rich cultural traditions, she developed an early connection to storytelling, music and poetry, which continue to inform her artistic practice.
She is currently completing a Bachelor of Music at the University of Cape Town’s South African College of Music, where she continues to deepen her knowledge of African music practices and develop her own musical language.
Her work draws strongly from African Indigenous music while bringing traditional sounds into conversation with contemporary expression. As both a live performer and poet, she uses music and storytelling to explore identity, heritage and connection, creating work that honours cultural tradition while allowing space for a personal and evolving artistic voice.
Kwakhanya Mboniswa is the Founder and Artistic Director of Clay House Theatre, a multidisciplinary creative organization dedicated to shaping stories that breathe, heal, and awaken. Born in East London and raised in Cape Town, their artistic journey spans more than seven years in the performing arts, rooted in training in Dramatic Arts and Dance and further nurtured at Magnet Theatre.
A performer, theatre-maker, published author, drama and dance facilitator, Kwakhanya believes that art is more than performance—it is a language of memory, identity, and transformation. Their work lives at the intersection of movement, music, literature, and theatre, creating intimate experiences that challenge, inspire, and connect communities.
Lutho “Magubu” Mzongwana is a multi instrumentalist, percussionist, composer, performer and teacher from Gugulethu. He began playing marimba in 2009 and is currently completing a Postgraduate Diploma in Theatre and Music Performance at the University of Cape Town, majoring in African Instruments.
He is a member of Blackroots Marimba and has performed with the UCT Ibuyambo Orchestra since 2019. His practice is centred on African instruments, percussion and collaborative performance. Alongside his work as a performer, Lutho teaches young people in Gugulethu and surrounding communities, sharing the musical knowledge and discipline he continues to develop through his own practice.
- Page Dina: Naturalised
The Naturalised (adj.): of a plant or animal, established in a region to which it is not native; of a person, admitted citizenship to a country not their own.
The work is an exploration of my own mixed heritage. Part of my lineage is settler, arriving and taking root by force; part is indigenous to this land, and was written out of the story I was raised inside. This piece engages the soil, and the body, as landscapes shaped by that same colonial history – where some of what happened has been erased, and some is still held. Soil is an archive: seed banks, pollen, ash, bone. The body is a comparable archive, carrying what it does not have words to name.
It asks, finally, how belonging comes about – whether it is something one claims for oneself, or whether it is decided by others.
Page Lotze is a performance artist, poet, community organiser and facilitator whose work takes up hope as praxis: a disciplined, active engagement with possibility. Their practice is fundamentally relational, attending to how we relate to one another and the living world – how connection is made, ruptured, and repaired – and how meaning emerges between us. Through intimate performance, participatory encounter, and poetry, they treat the body as both archive and instrument, holding spaces where attention becomes a form of kinship.
As one half of the performing poetry project Earth & Ether, they continue to develop work at the meeting point of poetry and performance and frequently collaborate with award-winning musicians including Tefo Mahola and Tubatsi Moloi.
A certified Life Coach, 500-hour Registered Yoga Teacher, and TRE practitioner, they also bring a decade of somatic facilitation and therapeutic group work to their live art practice.
- Siphesihle Nkantinii – The line is dead (Calling the Soil)
This is an exposition of bureaucracy as a void, a dead wire that only calculates while pretending to listen. An intervention on the absurdity of negotiation for a stolen land, displaced memory and ancestral inheritance.
We dance inside the illusion of leverage, mistaking a seat at the table for a seat on the land, pretending we hold the power to negotiate what was never theirs to “discover” and Claim.
We dial Azania. But the line stretches thin across decades of waiting. We are kept suspended in the purgatory of hold music—And waiting.
But it is only the system’s soft pacification, repeating the same polite violence: Please stay on the line; your call is important to us. We remain tethered to a corporate queue, waiting for a liberation that is constantly kept on hold.
Siphesihle Nkantini is a Cape Town-based artistic director, choreographer, writer, and theatre maker whose work exists at the volatile intersection of physical theatre, raw poetry, and structural interrogation. Grounded in rigorous physical training from Magnet Theatre and advanced studies in theatre making at the University of Cape Town, Nkantini has emerged as a vital voice in contemporary performance art—treating the stage not as a place for passive reflection, but as a laboratory for psychological and social dissection.
Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja: Composition,
Justina Andreas and Bupe Chiwala: Performance
Tschuku Tschuku: Music
0Owela Live Arts Collective – KINA
Kina /ˈkiːnə/ *a verb; dance, move (in multiple Southern African/Isintu languages).
This video work documents several performances of KINA, a performance inspired by Namibian and African drumming, drum making cultures and associated rituals. The work is named after an Oshiwambo dance that responds to the beating of drums and clanging of hoes (metal blades) usually performed in Efundula, a women’s initiation rite. KINA is a practice of shapeshifting bodies, queer initiates called oihanangolo (brides) also known as ovamati (boys). The work animates a kinaesthetic world of ashy bodies in trance.
Dr. Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Namibia where he trains theatre makers, teaching courses in acting, performance, writing and theatre pedagogy. He is a resident cultural worker, educator and
writer at Owela Live Arts Collective Trust. As a performance artist, his practice and research interests are in African performance archives and public cultures of social movements.
He obtained a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of Cape Town and was previously trained at University of Witwatersrand and the University of Namibia. His musical and performance work has been performed widely at festivals, museums, theatres and archives in India, Germany, Switzerland, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Cameroon, Senegal, United States of America and Namibia.
Justina Andreas Born in Windhoek in 1992, Nashipolo Justina Andreas is a Namibian professional dancer, performing artist, and educator. With two decades of training in dance, drama, and visual arts, she serves as a Dance Lecturer at the College of the Arts.
She holds a BA from UNAM, where she is currently in her first year of Masters in Performing Arts, and earned multiple Space Awards for acting and movement.
Her dynamic career features international performances in Germany and South Africa, diverse teaching roles, and recent stage productions like LAND and KINA. She remains a
leading force in Namibian performing arts.
Bupe Chiwala is a Zambian multidisciplinary creative whose work exists where story meets soul. Whether through dance, music, performance, or creative direction, she honours the
body as a sacred, living archive. Her practice centres the body as a space for feeling, release, and self-understanding. Through dance, she explores themes of sensuality, identity, and personal growth in a way that is both grounded and intentional. Her work creates space for people to connect with themselves more honestly, using movement as a tool for
expression, reflection, and becoming.
❇ Sponsored feature. Images supplied.
