From the publisher:

“Tswalo, re-published by iwalewabooks in 2019, entwines poetry and physical storytelling to interrogate the rules that govern life on earth, such as power, creation, politics, connection, and intuition – the performer's expression of his ‘source’. It is the product of a creative collaboration: written and performed by Billy Langa with Direction, Dramaturgy and Design by Mahlatsi Mokgonyana in collaboration with award-winning composer and sound designer John Withers.

Tswalo is the winner of the Standard Bank Ovation Award, Cape Town Fringe Fresh Performer Award and Cape Town Fringe Fresh Creative Award for Directing, and has toured South Africa, Namibia, Germany and Scandinavia. Tswalo is a body of poems constructed to fragment a narrative that is carried in both physicality and voice. It is placed in a timeless space of existence, which explores the primary themes of being, chaos and beauty, blood and birth, love and war in the same frame.

Tswalo combines ritual, physical storytelling and heightened text to create new distinct theatrical language as a way of reconstructing and deconstructing the orthodox and the traditional chronology of telling stories.”

A graduate from the Trevor Huddleson Centre and Market Theatre Lab, Billy Langa is a dancer, actor, playwright, and educator.

12 x 19 cm | 64 pages

iwalewabooks is an independent publishing house. “Through a number of series, we dedicate our publications to questions about aesthetic social discourses, the politics of collecting and debates about archives; and artist and academic positions from the Global South.”