Nie Ekke Nie
chorus
By Kanya VILJOEN | Performed by Darren CLOETE, Elzaan DANIELS, Emilie BADENHORST, Hanna TODD, Hendrik NIEUWOUDT, Karabo Hope BANDA, Roshina RATNAM, Thando MYEZA & Tylo RAS
PG 14 Sensitive Subject Matter
Nie Ekke Nie is a multilingual, chorus-based reimagining of Samuel Beckett’s Not I. But, instead of one disembodied mouth, there are nine. Nine mouths that spit, swallow, stutter and scream through silences carved by history. The language and syntax are fractured, scattered across a chorus of multigenerational, multigendered bodies, each haunted by inherited memory, buried violence, and things left unsaid. The rhythm broken.
Voices layer, collide and interrupt until silence itself becomes a kind of testimony. In a country still stitched with denial, Nie Ekke Nie asks: Who speaks? Who is heard? And what happens when we finally say it - out loud?
KANYA VILJOEN
Kanya Viljoen is a South African writer, director, and academic whose work spans theatre, film, and scholarship. She completed her BA and MA in Theatre Making at UCT, as an Andrew W. Mellon scholar. Currently, she is completing a PhD in English Philology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.
As a theatre-maker, Kanya directed and wrote plays such as RAAK (Winner of the KYKnet Fiesta Award) and Like Hamlet (Winner of Anex Theatre Bursary). She is the cofounder of Unusual Bones, an interdisciplinary collective whose short films, ekstasis (2020), The Moment of Dying (2021) and ‘n Doop (2023) have received multiple awards, including the Silver Screen at the Cannes Young Director Awards, Best Director at Jozi Film Festival, and Best Director at Silwerskerm Fees.
Her creative and scholarly practice consistently engages questions of multiculturalism, embodiment, and representation, within a postcolonial framework.