Circle Song

Circle Song is a memory piece. Spoken from a narrator’s perspective across an arc of time, it is a re-imagined past of people who left the shores of Ireland and England to begin a life in South Africa. It rests though on a story prompted by a real life event: After a severe brain operation, my mother wakes to the world as a fifteen year old version of herself. The production is also about holding space for the memory of those that shimmer somewhere in the radiance of your own presence, to provoke a memory trigger of your own, so that whatever is being suggested, whatever begins to inhabit the space is shaped by your own memory.

The play reimagines ancestral stories and the migrations that have shaped the family’s history, while addressing the larger questions of what it means to be human, to belong, and to navigate the shifting landscape of memory and time.

Production Credits

'Circle Song' could not have found a voice without good friends - and performers themselves - Aldo Brincat and Rajesh Gopie in the collaboration on each other’s stories; Graham Hopkins and Tony Bentel in the early script revisions and the directorial eyes of Mbongeni Mtshali (UCT) and Caroline Esterhuizen.

Directed by: Caroline Calburn

Written by: Ashley Dowds

Performed by: Ashley Dowds