| What:ย Working Title, Live Art Weekend at Masambe Presents โย Soft Rebellion When:ย December 11 – 13 2025, Thursday โ Saturday Venue:ย Masambe Theatre, Baxter Theatre Centre, Cape Town Time:ย 7pm. The programme is about 90 minutes. Bookings:ย Webtickets Direct booking link:ย https://www.webtickets.co.za/v2/event.aspx?itemid=1558924248 Tickets:ย R160 full price, R100 students /seniors/group booking Curator:ย Carin Bester Featured artists:ย Amogelang Pila Ditlhale & Thato Ditlhale – Reimagination of Blackness: Re-narrating Perceptions (Video Art) Cheryl Traub Adler & Garth Erasmus โ Erase / Mark / Hold Nomandla Vilakazi โ โThe Exhibitionโ Smamkele Mentyisi & Sange Mpambani โ Nkanyezi kaSililo: Initiation Zizi Onkabetse Masizana โ Vroulikheidย Note:ย There will be a short Q & A session with the artists after the performances on Thursday December 11. Some of the performances will be taking place outside. It is summer but do take something warm in case it is a chilly night Age restriction: No under 16s ย |
Working Title is wrapping up 2025, with Live Art Weekend: Soft Rebellion in the Baxter Masambe. As with previous Live Art Weekend events, the Masambe precinct is activated โ inside and outside spaces so do bring something warm to wear in case the Cape Town Summer shifts into a cold evening. The theme, Soft Rebellion, embraces โworks that transmute harm, choosing beauty not as ornament, but as evidence of survival.โ Curator Carin Bester: โHow, do we confront pain without performance, invite memory without spectacle, and offer care without apology?โ Read on for more. Info as supplied:
Working Title presents:
In a world desensitised by ongoing injustice, Soft Rebellion invites artists to explore tenderness as resistance. This Live Art Weekend calls for works that transmute harm, choosing beauty not as ornament, but as evidence of survival.
We seek a rebellion that provokes. Work that asks: how do we see differently when we refuse to meet brutality with more brutality? How, do we confront pain without performance, invite memory without spectacle, and offer care without apology?
This is softness not as weakness, but as strategy. The quiet gesture in the aftermath, a tenderness that refuses to disappear. Works that evoke deep emotional connection and insist on the urgency of feeling and witnessing.
This is not silence. This is softness with a pulse; let it be felt.
Curated by Carin Bester
Dates: December 11 – 13 2025, Thursday โ Saturday.
There will be a short Q & A session with the artists after the performances on Thursday December 11
Venue: The Masambe Theatre at The Baxter Theatre Centre
Time: 19:00 Runs approximately 90min.
Tickets available at Webtickets
R160 Full Price – R100 Student / Pensioner / Group Booking
Please be aware some performances will take place outside. No under 16s
Featuring artists:
- Amogelang Pila Ditlhale & Thato Ditlhale – Reimagination of Blackness- Perceptions: Re-narrating the Black Experience (Video Art)
An interrogation into the ways Blackness is seen and understood, emphasising the importance of shifting the narratives away from colonial distortions and inherited traumas, towards a re-affirmation of confidence, ancestry, and our lived excellence.
At its core, this exploration is about reclaiming the authority to tell our own stories. Through art black figures, especially women are repositioned not as subjects of erasure or distortion, but as custodians of principles, gifts, and skills that continue to shape our societies.
This is not only an artistic theme but also a cultural responsibility: to enlighten, interrogate, and inspire reconnection with self and community. By re-narrating the Black experience, we move from being defined by trauma to affirming a collective future rooted in renewal, creativity, and thriving as we are.
Amogelang Pila is a South African mixed media visual artist and an art experimentalist who is a daughter, mother of 3, wife and a friend. She finds interest in examining and navigating in spaces of exploration and expression that often portrays her attention towards the broadness of social change, renewal, spirituality, companionship and positive representation for black/brown people. She works across visual, performative, and curatorial practices, alongside media and organisational skills. The work that she produces is often reflected through her lens of being a woman, a mother and an expressionist with the love and responsibility of using visual storytelling as a means of fostering change.
Thato Ditlhale is a South African-born multi-disciplinary practitioner, with more than 15 years of experience in the cultural and creative industries. His portfolio includes producing, cultural consultancy, facilitation, and creative direction. He builds artistic interventions that move beyond performance, positioning audiences as active contributors to his work. Guided by the richness of his Tswana and SeSotho heritage, his storytelling carries honesty, sensitivity, and soulful elegance.
- Cheryl Traub Adler & Garth Erasmus โ Erase / Mark / Hold
Cheryl Traub Adler and Garth Erasmus bring their creative partnership to Erase/Mark/Hold, an interdisciplinary performance exploring the spaces between presence and absence, gesture and memory. Drawing on their collaborative history across workshops, curation, music, and dance, the artists create a dialogue where marking becomes witness, and erasure opens space for new exploration and meaning. Using fabric, canvas, pigment, charcoal, sound, and light, the work intervenes in architecture, softening the edges and redirecting its flow. Large sheets of canvas draped across steps and structures, create a threshold where participants anchor and can trace bodies, leaving their marks that are blurred, smudged, or erased through collective action. What unfolds, balances and arrives at stoppage and movement, is the shared act of marking and erasure, the audience becomes co-author, leaving behind the remnants of time, presence, memory, and the impossibility of complete erasure. The work resists closure, instead becoming a living imprint of personal space, shared histories, and new beginnings.
Cheryl Traub Adler is an artist whose public practice merges performance, installation, and activism. Her work foregrounds embodiment, collective authorship, and the politics of visibility, creating spaces where art becomes both a living imprint and a quiet form of resistance. She has presented her work in many group and solo exhibitions and extends her practice into the landscape through site-specific and land art installation. International residencies have deepened her exploration of cross-cultural exchange, while early career experiences teaching for many years including the modality of Bridging Polarities through Art and working with the Cape Town Opera Company has informed a sensitivity to voice, movement, costume informing an insightful merging of theatre making and art.
Garth Erasmus is a visual artist and musician whose work weaves together ancestral lineage, civil rights, and art as resistance.
His practice centres on deep listening and embodied sound, a resonance that draws him toward collaboration with musicians, dancers, and interdisciplinary artists.
Through his distinctive sonic language, Erasmusโs collaboration in Erase/Mark/Hold bears witness to timeless communities, lament and alternative ways of knowing.
- Nomandla Vilakazi โ โThe Exhibitionโ
The Exhibition of the Black Femme Body was created to pay tribute to Sara โSaartjieโ Baartman and all she endured, and to mark the renaming of UCTโs Jameson Hall in her honour. That performance set the tone for my artist journey, opening me to receive the love of my ancestors and affirm the beauty and agency of other black African bodies like mine.
Since the 2019 Gender-Based Violence protests, creating work that speaks to my life as a black woman has been imperative to my survival. These opportunities have also offered affirmation and solidarity to other black women navigating a white male dominated industry.
Through my research on our grand ancestor Sara โSaartjieโ Baartman I move from survival towards thriving in the wonder of the divine feminine and itsโ gifts. As a survivor of assault and harassment, I have learnt to channel pain, frustration, shame, and self-hatred into art. In doing so, my healing journey began.
Nomandla Vilakazi is a black African femme body living in South Africa. She recently completed her Masters of Documentary Arts at the University of Cape Town with a focus on Sara Baartman and depictions of the black femme body in popular culture and throughout history. She is a gender-based violence activist and has channelled the desire to end GBV and femicide throughout her storytelling and filmmaking. She has worked in the NGO-sector and production industry and has many years of experience in producing, marketing, and communications. Overall, she finds deep value in the archive of the world: from working with the District Six Museum and affiliates to retell narratives of those displaced; to working with the UCT TV Studio and gaining knowledge of the origins of Cape Townโs film industry โ Nomandla will always have space in her life for knowledge, archive and history.
- Smamkele Mentyisi & Sange Mpambani โ Nkanyezi kaSililo: Initiation
โIt takes a village to raise a childโ โฆ and it takes the same village to bury a child.
Nkanyezi ka Sililo: INITIATION -borrows African traditional modes of healing to facilitate a healing experience for the black queer body. The performance is a commentary on the importance of community and family in trauma healing. Nkanyezi ka Sililo challenges the rhetoric that queerness is un-African by integrating queer trauma healing within an African community-based context.
Smamkele Mentyisi is a theatre maker, writer, and performance artist based in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. He holds a BA (Hons) in Theatre & Performance Studies (Majoring in Theatre Making) from the University of Cape Town. Smamkeleโs work explores being black, queer, masculine and spiritual in a post-apartheid South Africa. Their work utilizes, sonic psychedelia, image collages, and performative installations.
Sange Mpambani is a performance artist, curator, writer from eHewu, Eastern Cape. He holds a BA in Drama and BA Hons in Art History and Visual Culture from Rhodes University, South Africa. He is currently a curatorial fellow at CCA, UCT. His work Explores themes of intimacy, relation, queerness in post-apartheid South Africa. He Occasionally writes for the research institute ASAI.
- Zizi Onkabetse Masizana โ Vroulikheid
Vroulikheid reimagines the ritualised welcoming dances of the Kalakuta Queens, transposing them into a South African live performance piece, anchored by Afrikaner domestic imagery. Beneath kappies, aprons, lace, and veldskoene, the performance summons a body caught between colonial memory and ancestral rhythm.
As audiences enter, they are welcomed by a living ritual. Domestic objects are recast as talismans, stripped of utility and charged with spiritual force. Unsettling the nostalgia of Afrikaner nationalism while honouring old afrobeat and highlife radical spiritual practices. Hospitality becomes both embrace and confrontation at the threshold of resistance. An invitation to transform domesticity from submission to possession. Each night a communal rite in the space(s).
Zizi Onkabetse Masizana is an emerging performance artist, theatre maker, cultural worker, and facilitator based between Cape Town and Johannesburg. Her embodied practice and research are an insistence on and entitlement to white Afrikaans historical archives and sites, approached as an investigative and history-revisionist practice. Through this revision, she creates interventions that question, subvert, and translate historical narratives into critical and sensory experiences.
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