The 2021, Silver Standard Bank Ovation Award Winning experimental filmed production Old Soul Waiting by Slindile Mthembu, returns for its first live performance at the Soweto Theatre at 7pm on 31 March 2023.
Old Soul Waiting explores how ancestral calling is misdiagnosed as a form of mental illness and combines narrative and interpretative dance into a fascinating hybrid experience of what a spiritual awakening possibly looks like in the Western and the spiritual realm. Mthembu, invites audiences to enter through a woman’s memory, who is referred to in the play as Bongeziwe (played by Slindile Mthembu). Bongeziwe takes us through her childhood memory of growing up in an orphanage, where she discovers that she has an old soul-Moya (spiritual being) that lives in her(played by Simtandile Sityebi). Bongeziwe wakes up years, days or months later feeling restrained in a white isolated white room, where she sees the old soul(spiritual being), and is examined and treated by a nurse. Through the examination and treatment, Bongeziwe falls in and out of sleep and is visited by her makhulu (elderly woman) in her dreams to warn her about this place. One woman. Two split personalities. Which woman do we believe?
