- Kofifi Theatre Company + Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre | Sophiatown, South Africa
The invitation from the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre (THMC) was to design an urban food garden with Kofifi Youth Theatre Company for the new community theatre building in Sophiatown, Johannesburg. Our response was to share Hands In Soil workshop with Kofifi theatre members as a way for us all to reconnect to natural, vital living soil as the first step for this urban food project. From this first encounter, Kofifi evolved a sequence of truly ground-making performances, each illuminating the vital connections between our human liberation and the flourishing of the living whole.
These include Taste the Garden at Food Wine Design Fair, Pula at Tastes of Maboneng; Song to Soil performed at (dis)locations/(trans)formations at the Bag Factory; and Third Paradise-Rebirth Day at NIROX Foundation. The collaboration helped strengthen Kofifi’s theatre practice and bring principles of ecological design into the heart of the new building and its gardens.
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Memory. Food as life. Life itself as food. We have never had this as a company. This is where we start creating, that moment of stillness, activating your senses, feeling your truth. Let’s see what the soil will give us. It brings us down to earth.
Billy Langa, member of Kofifi and award-winning actor, educator and co-founder of Theatre Duo Mahlatsi.
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Hands In Soil started us on a journey which we were obviously ready for but didn’t know it. We began thinking about growing in a way we had not thought about growing before, whether it was growing staff, or growing young people, through that green window and perspective on sustainability.
Tricia Sibbons, Director of THMC
