Intwasa Festival Coming
Again- 08/07/2006
By Nomvuyo Mdluli
INTWASA Festival will, this year, rock the city
of Bulawayo
for the second time from the 5th to the 9th of September 2006 in various venues in the city.
This year’s events include music, which
will feature choral music competition, schools drama competition, film festival, which will include local, regional and international
exhibitions. The literary subcommittee is organizing a competition for both school students and school leavers.
In an interview, the chairman of the organizing
committee, Nicholas Moyo, said there would also be a fashion show hosted by Alliance
France for two days.
“This year being the second edition of Intwasa
festival will see the growth and improvement of the festival as last year was a stepping stone and a learning curve for us.” Said Mr. Moyo.
This year there will also be the launch of the
Bulawayo Large City Hall as the permanent venue for the festival.
“However, there will be different scattered
venues for different events including Bulawayo theatre for theatre, Bulawayo small city hall for dance and music whist Amphitheatre will take care of schools
festivals and the Art gallery for arts and visual arts. One of the cinemas at the Bulawayo
rainbow will cater for films,” he said.
Intwasa Festival started last year. It managed
to generate a lot of interest in its debut year. In the theatre category, it featured plays such as Sihlangu Dlodlo’s
musical, Pen Pals.
The annual children’s drama festival, Umkhosi Wabatsha, has come under review. Resident theatre Manager, Styx Mhlanga, met
a group of teachers to discuss how the festival can be reinvented and taken into
the future in line with the centre’s golden jubilee goals.
“The challenge has been to map out an action
plan for the drama festival,” said Mhlanga.
Mhlanga has so far held meetings with schools’
representatives and mapped a way forward to improve the drama competition so that it is aligned with the golden jubilee goals.
Mhlanga sits in the Amakhosi programming committee
as a theatre representative. An experienced and established theatre artist, he has produced a lot of plays and worked in theatre
ever since his graduation in acting with Iluba Elimnyama and directing with Amakhosi Theatre. He directed Nansi Le Ndoda,
where he worked with artists like Mandla Moyo, Thulani Mbambo and Thembekile Ngwabi.
He runs Studio X Artists.
A great net worker in theatre as he is driven
by pat ion, patience and struggle, Mhlanga, comes at a time when theatre is almost dead and his chief task is to resuscitate
it. He is reviving it in terms of schools, amateur, professional, community and industrial theatre.
“The ultimate objective of the meeting is to come up with a holistic approach towards putting together a schools competition that
involves all stakeholders and will collect and keep scripts performed by the schools,” said Mhlanga.
He said, Amakhosi would like to develop a schools
competition that will grow and does not end with the competition.
“The long term dream is to adopt a school
set-book which can be dramatized and then produced with the cream of student talent identified during Umkhosi Wabatsha High Schools Competition. ,” he said.
At the moment it was agreed that the deadline
for all competing schools to hand in their scripts is the end of January 2006.
Meanwhile the competitions have been set for the
time between the end of July to the beginning of August, while August has been set aside for rehearsing the set-book.
“Only original scripts are acceptable for
this competition,” Mhlanga said.
The battle is not only for audiences but for talent
too.
