CHIPAWO turns professional

Chipawo revitalises children's creativity -Newsday Zimbabwe

Zim Now Writer

Arts Organisation Chipawo will reveal its first full time professional youth theatre company called New Horizon Youth Theatre, premiering the company’s first play titled ‘Rudo neRunyararo.’

It will also announce Chipawo’s involvement in the international Culture for Sustainable and Inclusive Peace project.

The play will run from March 22 to April 1 at Theatre in the Park at the Harare Gardens in Harare.

It is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by renowned thespians Peter Churu and Robert Mshengu Kavanagh, is set in a small town in Zimbabwe and acted in Shona.

It centres on the disputes and hostilities between the mayor, a local bus company owner and their families. The squabbles even involve domestic conflicts, leading to inevitable tragedy, which opens their eyes and those of the community to the futility of their hatred and the need for reconciliation.

Although the company has finally launched as a full time professional outfit, New Horizon Youth Theatre has been in existence since 2003.

The company has performed in several venues in Harare at places such as Reps Theatre and in numerous other cities and towns all over Zimbabwe.

Their major plays include ‘Vicious’, an SJ Chifunyise masterpiece about middle class poverty, ‘Soul Sister Comes to Africa’, also by Chifunyise, ‘The Little Man of Murewa’ and adapted from Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘Little Claus and Big Claus’, which premiered at HIFA and in Denmark.

Other works include The Gaza Monologues with Ashtar Theatre in Palestine; Calderon della Barca’s ‘The Dream of Life’, translated in Shona as ‘Mutambo Wepanyika’; and more recently Lu Xun’s ‘The True Story of Ah Q’ which ran for a week at the Jason Mpepo Theatre in Harare.

CHIPAWO administers a number of different projects, including those focused on arts education, early education, gender, child rights, HIV/AIDS, poverty reduction, the deaf, the mentally and physically disabled, rural children, the girl child, and orphans.

CUSP is an international programme, hosted by the University of Glasgow in Scotland which aims to explore ways of resolving conflicts and initiating reconciliation and transformation through the arts.

Other participants include Litfest in Harare, Ghana, Mexico, Morocco, Palestine and Scotland.