Dante & Mashudu - Cape Town

ABOUT

The project of this show was born from the Dante Alighieri Society in Johannesburg at the time of the 700th anniversary of the death of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, and the idea of creating a theatre show that was going to culturally bridge Italy and South Africa.

Initial questions that arose were:

• why and how would Dante be relevant to us in South Africa today?
• How can we reread and reinterpret Dante in the South African context?

It soon became clear that it was not about bringing Dante to South Africa with a theatre show that would have celebrated his main work, the Divine Comedy; rather it was about recreating and reimagining Dante here in South Africa, letting him spring from South African soil.

The writer of the script came along and put into words all those initial thoughts and ideas; then the Johannesburg School of Mask and Movement Theatre came along and put on stage the writers’ words. The Italian Embassy in Pretoria, the Consulate General of Italy in Johannesburg, the Consulate of Italy in Cape Town, the Italian Cultural Institute in Pretoria came on board and made possible the realisation of the project in collaboration with the Dante Alighieri Society in Rome, Cape Town and Durban.

Here, Dante is thought and represented by South African creativity in a game of mirrors and cross-references that invite us to reflect in an original way on the past and present history of South Africa and, at the same time, to reread the Divine Comedy with new eyes.

For more information, pictures and video: https://italianculturalinstitute.co.za/dante/

DIRECTIONS