Thuthuka Sibisi steps into the Bespokery in Parkview radiating the kind of energy you wish you could package and sell.
He has that warm glow of accomplishment about him, which is probably the effect of coming down the final straight on the sold-out production of The Head and the Load.
He has worked on it for the past several years with William Kentridge and choreographer Gregory Maqoma.
Together they created and toured this grand visionary poem — theatre as an immersive experience that feels like it is taking your senses hostage, shaking them up and giving them a cathartic rinsing. Thuthuka co-composed the music with Philip Miller, appears on stage and was quietly directing the music and pulling the strings backstage.
Composer, creative director, artist — he is an intensely creative person who finds himself in full bloom.
It is a long way from his days as a fledgling chorister in the Drakensberg Boys Choir to the internationally feted artist who creates in multiple mediums for a rapt global audience.
He tells me that as a boy in the Drakensberg choir he promised himself he would perform in all the big eight opera houses of the world.
The choir, with its Lord of the Flies vibe that boarding schools can engender, was where he learnt many of the lessons he practises to this day.
“We make these jokes, this is a bit like child labour. It’s insane, you have chorus three times a day. You’ve got school, and then you have sport, you’ve got homework, a concert once a week, every second weekend a show, and then you’ve got one international tour and two national tours a year.
“You see your parents once every three of four months. And at the end when you are leaving, depending on the number of years you have been at the school, you get R400 or R600 in an envelope.
“But at the same time it was one of the most important ways of learning for me. I still find myself applying a lot of what we learnt in rehearsal technique. It was hard but there was something quite beautiful about being that independent that early.”
We have ordered some small, delicious, clean, contemporary dishes to share: cauliflower croquets and calamari. The bright interiors with pistachio green elements pair nicely with the fresh tastes on our table.
Thuthuka’s year has been intense. “Greg [Maqoma] and I have been on the road with Broken Chord. We just got back from a five-week tour — Paris, Canada, London — which was great. I’m working on a new album and I start my PhD this year — so that is kicking my arse dealing with the paperwork.
Do you know what it is? It’s this panic — because half the time I think I moved in silence, people don’t know what I do and how I do it — and part of that is that historically as artists we don’t have enough spaces or money to make a lot of work
“And I’m creating a new piece which I have already started. I’m looking at the intimacies between men in the men’s hostels in downtown Joburg.
“It’s half field research, half performance installation, half dance show. The idea of boy wives, when older men had younger men to do the domestic side, and the older man would be like the safe keeper but also the breadwinner — creating traditional gendered roles.
“What I find fascinating is as soon as the young boys would start growing facial hair — they would call them nkonyana — they would wear a handkerchief over their face to hide their masculinity and transmute them into a more feminine boy.
“But when they leave this space and go out into the real world then they become ndoda [a mature man] — the Zuluness comes out. I am really interested in the inside-outside, private and public space — and thinking about how masculinity is both problematic and questionable in South Africa and how it manifests in violence against women and corrective rape.”
I am feeling a bit of whiplash from all this.
“Do you know what it is? It’s this panic — because half the time I think I moved in silence, people don’t know what I do and how I do it — and part of that is that historically as artists we don’t have enough spaces or money to make a lot of work.
“But now with [The Head and Load] coming home I am having a moment and feel confident enough to call myself an artist. I’ve always called myself a reluctant artist, probably because there are people in the wings waiting to take you down, so now I feel I have to own it.”
I think the giant billboard across the N1 with his name emblazoned across it may have given the game away. I wonder how he feels about this particular years-long journey drawing to a close.
“There is something about bringing the show home, there’s something about putting it to rest here at home ... This is a feeling, not a confirmation, because there are still ambitions of taking it to Senegal and Nigeria, but it feels like it’s really come to an end now and so there is sadness in thinking how far and how much you put into the work, but also the relationships that you make with everyone.
“This is the madness of this kind of art, you walk in knowing that the end is going to come, the promise of the end is always coming, so it’s a sadness but also a joy and pride in what we created.”
• The final performance of ‘The Head and the Load’ was on Saturday night.
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