Listening Bodies | Chuma Sopotela (South Africa)

Chuma Sopotela is an award-winning South African actress, director, choreographer and performance artist. In 2018 she was named a Standard Bank Young Artist for Performance Art. Her stage works are performances that deal with issues and conflicts that affect her life as a woman but also as a resident of Khayelitsha, the township where she grew up and still lives today. She is both an activist and an artist and sees the stage as a place of healing. Today she teaches at the University of Capetown. In the podcast we learn that Chuma Sopotela used her acting talent and her love of theater as a child and adolescent to create moments of shared relief, amusement and resistance in an everyday life marked by violence and anxiety. She shows us how she turns the stage into a shrine enlivened by everyday objects. She also shows us that the struggle for change on and off stage can be fought without violence.