It is rather unsettling that only a handful of people locally are aware of who Dimpho Di Kopane (DDK) are. Those who understand Sotho will put a meaning together: ‘combined talents”.
It might just be that a greater percentage of people overseas are in the know. This lyric theatre company from the Western Cape has toured London, Perth, Charleston, New Haven, Turkey, Dublin, Toronto and are now performing off-Broadway in New York.
The company opened its Season South Africa on October 27 with Yiimimangaliso (The Mysteries) in the synod hall of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in Amsterdam Avenue, Manhattan, and will be performing this and three other stage works in repertory there until December 5.
Together with The Mysteries, New Yorkers are also experiencing DDK’s personal take on uCarmen — the opera not set in the traditional Seville, but in Khayelitsha — as well as Ibali lootsotsi (The Beggar’s Opera), loosely based on John Gay’s early 18th-century work, but stylistically and visually more strongly influenced by Bertolt Brecht’s re-think in The Threepenny Opera.
A fourth production premiered in New York and will only been seen in South Africa in March next year at Spier’s summer festival. It is called Ikumkanikazi yeKhephu (The Snow Queen) and is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, but set in Africa. This work has been commissioned by the Hans Christian Andersen Foundation in Denmark to celebrate the author’s bicentenary next year.
DDK is the success story of a company that fully empowered grassroots talent. This gives it an African character and edge.
Productions are developed collectively under the guidance of their British-born director, Mark Dornford-May, and MD and conductor Charles Hazlewood. The only well-known South African theatre practitioner who is connected to them is Mannie Manim as lightning designer. Everyone else, including the assistant directors and music directors are in-house and constantly perform on stage.
New York critics and public alike took to DDK’s ‘raw energy”, as The New York Times‘s half page review put it, in all four productions. True-to-life emotions removed the possible impression of ‘staginess” some of them might have had.
When speaking to individuals from the audience after the performances, I found that they often commented on the ‘gutsy” way feelings are expressed. An opera lover who had experienced his 12th production of Carmen, including at least two of the Americanised Carmen Jones, told me: ‘After seeing this I realise how much in the way of gritty, believable emotions your African performers can fully play out in comparison to our black performers, who more often than not don’t seem to reach those levels.”
‘Dimpho Di Kopane is a fine exponent of rough theatre in the most positive sense of the word,” said Lars Seeberg, the secretary general of the Hans Christian Andersen 2005 committee.
DDK’s production of The Snow Queen was lyrically and symbolically the meaningful journey on stage one had hoped for. The company’s wonderful, affecting a capella singing at the opening of the play, and the way African instruments and sound effects later built up the story to bold statements that underlined the story’s universal moral beacons, made it an experience one just had to experience a second time.
DDK has also recently spread its wings through the establishment of Spier Films. It has completed filming its production of Carmen, shot mainly in Khayelitsha, where it will premiere on March 5 next year (130 years to the day after the opera’s Paris premiere), while their second project will most likely be to film The Mysteries. The stage production of this as it stands now demonstrates the amazing growth the company has undergone since first performing the piece in 2000.
Attention should at this stage be given to some wayward English and Afrikaans pronunciation and weaknesses in pitching when singing, as in the final act of Carmen in New York.