The Fall is a collaborative piece of Workshop Theatre devised by eight dynamic recent graduates from UCT’s Drama Department and facilitated by Clare Stopford. These students have all already made their mark on the local theatre scene. It is based on their experiences as people of colour during the #RhodesMustFall and subsequent movements. It hones in on their individual and intersectional challenges in the movement.
Colonisation continues to haunt us materially, socially and psychologically. Students, workers and academics all over South Africa are taking it upon themselves to tackle the still-continuing, silent, traumatic effects of oppression in South Africa.
The #RhodesMustFall Movement served as a major clarion call to a mass of people of colour (POC) at the University of Cape Town and tertiary institutions all over South Africa. Although there were working groups long before the famous "poo-throwing", the mass student movement (and the ones that followed throughout the year, all over the country) provoked worldwide discourse and action. The movement ballooned into wider discussion on blackness, feminism, institutionalised racism, sexuality, transgender and gender non-binary erasure and access to education. Students all over South Africa had been articulating and trying to resolve what many had been thinking and feeling before. Equality cannot only be served through legislation. Trauma is rooted in the everyday experiences of the oppressed.
The project started after their season of Barney Simon’s Black Dog/Inj’emnyama at the Baxter Flipside in 2015. The challenge of telling the story of students in the 1976 uprisings invited the idea of reflecting lives of people of colour in 2016 - as ourselves. "If we can tell a story about 1976 so adequately, why can't we tell a story of ourselves, in 2016?"
The Fall thus came as a healing process from the experience of Black Dog/Inj’emnyama, and is simultaneously a retrospective look at the events depicted as well as a reflection of where POC student lives are in 2016. The play doesn't offer solutions but it hopes to raise dialogue - as it did in the workshop process - on intersectional, institutionalized discrimination against the marginalized majority.
The writers and cast include Ameera Conrad (Don’t Shoot the Harbinger, People Beneath Our Feet), Oarabile Ditsele (Woza Albert, Identirrhaging), Tankiso Mamabolo (Nothing But the Truth, Fabulous Nothing), Thando Mangcu (Don’t Shoot the Harbinger, The Shipment), Sizwesandile Mnisi (Woza Albert, Connection to Home), Sihle Mnqwazana (My Children! My Africa!, Identirrhaging) and Cleo Raatus (Black Dog/Inj’emnyama, District Six Kanala).
