Circle Song

Background to Circle Song

At an afternoon spent under the trees at the Company Gardens cafe and after a double exhibition by Aldo Brincat of his ‘Chasing Concrete Halos’ (Itself a pursuit of the shadows behind our ‘personal’ monuments) Rajesh Gopi, Aldo and I found most of the conversation moving into our stories of connection; Connection with the people whose choices led us to this point in time - whether it was to take a ship to South Africa in order to become labour in the cane fields of Natal; to leave a family behind in the collateral damage of a failed relationship, or to find love during war in Egypt. Those were the stories that still float part of our imagination about who we are in a country that has become our home but is not the soil of our ancestors.

Sharing the stories is what inspired the writing of them. Some are substantiated truth; some have developed a sense of truth in the imaginative visits to those moments in our past and those choices made by our people before we even existed. When we are able to gather and listen to these, we hope that it is not any gimmickry or staging that give value to the story, but the human connection that finds the live thread that cuts us to the ‘quick’.

“Imagine behind me, three generations ago in a busy Belfast street - two men leave the shore of Northern Ireland…"  The creative process began with “touch points” - my mother’s scissors, hairdresser’s shawl, pipe …. objects which carry in themselves visceral memory. The script is a reimagining of the ancestral stories and journeys. Locations switch from “the old world in Ireland, to Africa and journeys within the sub-continent, ending in Durban. Actual family stories surface with the characters that make up that journey: my grandmother’s half-crown; her brother, arrested by a German tank commander in North Africa… The unexpected turn that is foreshadowed at the beginning of the story (a letter from an ancestor no one remembers anymore) is my mother’s shift into an interior world of her own, which operates parallel to the story presented through the eyes of a jaded surgeon and my father.

Time is a stretch of nerve fibres: seemingly continuous from a distance but disjointed close up, with microscopic gaps between fibres. Nervous action flows through one segment of time, abruptly stops, pauses, leaps through a vacuum, and resumes in the neighbouring segment… the illusion of constancy and continuity, to cope with the uncertainty and unpredictability of life…’ Alan Lightman, ‘EINSTEINS DREAMS’

…if you don’t have ancestors, you have ghosts; and you end up living a very haunted life… your capacity to tell a story, to stand for a story, to let a story work through you, will help you articulate the lament of the dead. I’m not talking about séances, we Understand. I’m talking about knowing the ground that you stand upon. Martin Shaw, West Country School of Myth

Circle Song was at various stages directed by Caroline Esterhuizen and Mbongeni Mtshali.

Colour photo by Mark Wessels | B&W photo by Jonathan Rees | National Arts Festival Makhanda 2025