Create Your First Project
Start adding your projects to your portfolio. Click on "Manage Projects" to get started
Eurydice
Project Type
Site-specific Play
Date
2022
Cast & Crew
Directed and Adapted by Kanya Viljoen
Translated by Kanya Viljoen and Qondiswa James
With Qondiswa James, Ydalie Turk, Francesco Nassimbeni, Thukelo Maka, Darren
Cloete, Faylene van Rooyen, Andoné Strydom and Karla Luyt
Design Kanya Viljoen and Nell van der Merwe
Dramaturgy Emilie Badenhorst
Stage-Managers Keandri van Wyk and Kayla Dunne
In association with Theatre Arts Admin, The Drama Factory, Jan van Riebeeck High School, and City
Bowl Park.
Press
Press
In this local take on Sarah Ruhl’s text based on the Greek myth, Orpheus and Eurydice, Eurydice is imagined in an empty abandoned swimming pool in Cape Town city centre. The infamous myth is reimagined to focus on the journey of its heroine as the play deals with themes of love, loss, remembrance, and reminiscence.
Eurydice, Sarah Ruhl’s internationally-acclaimed contemporary play, has been translated and adapted by Kanya Viljoen and Qondiswa James to sit within a South African context - translated into Afrikaans and isiXhosa. The use of multiple languages creates a sense of the power dynamics experienced within these languages in South Africa. This multicultural and multilingual piece hopes to create a dialogue around young South Africans and the way we fall in and out of love with one another.
The choice of staging the play in an empty swimming pool seeks to allow theatre to move away from passive viewership to active engagement with an experience. It invites an audience to a “pool party”, to a space where they themselves need to position, locate and engage with the performers as extensions of themselves.
