Creating Sound Dramaturgy in the Visual Radio Plays

Monday 18 December 2023 marked one hundred years since the first radio broadcast in South Africa. This experimental introduction to radio, which went live from Railway Headquarters in Johannesburg, was broadcast at the Johannesburg and Cape Town train stations. It heralded a new way of communication and brought South Africa into the twentieth century.

Sometime around the early 1940s to 1950s—after South Africans had consumed primarily British content, including news, music, weather, and some British plays—local “radio dramas,” were introduced, beginning with IsiZulu. These plays (as they were then known; they would come to be called “dramas” much later) were framed by the authorities of the day as part of—and ostensibly in service of—the colonial and later Apartheid project. Thus, they had very little to do with entertainment but were much more concerned with maintaining hegemony and the status quo of the time.

Academic and researcher Liz Gunner, who has published widely on South African literature, culture, and the history of radio, is credited with much of what we know

In one of her most recent books, Radio Soundings: South Africa and the Black Modern (2019), Gunner chronicles how radio dramas became a staple for Black entertainment, but beyond that created space for subversion departing from prescribed propagandist scripts and storylines in subtle, overt, and creative ways that escaped the close attention of the authorities’ brutal censorship policies.

In an interview about her book with Louisa Mentjes for the CaMP Anthropology blog, Liz Gunner was keen to point out that these dramas, and in this case Zulu radio dramas,

seemed to be set deep in people’s memories and were a way they could tap into certain emotions about the fascination and strain and pleasure of events that circled usually around the family. They seemed to provide sites of recognition, self-knowledge, self-exploration, ways of accessing the self, often the deep self. They were also important as narratives, journeys… to understand how people had vibrant and creative lives in spite of the pains of apartheid.

From Radio Drama to Visual Radio Plays

Radio dramas have been a staple in terms of entertainment for many South African households, but over the years that popularity has waned significantly. In the Visual Radio Plays project, Neo Muyanga and his collaborators to re-engaged this medium of radio.

The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg—an experimental art space founded by world renowned artist, filmmaker and performer William Kentridge—hosted the Visual Radio Plays project, with Muyanga as the project’s impresario. The Visual Radio Plays invited “a gathering of writers and performers in the realms of theatre to explore and expand upon the medium of the radio play by staging a series of Visual Radio Plays for a live audience.” 

Through the project, six visual radio plays were produced: The Dalmatian and the Duck by Andrew Buckland, World-Class African Citizens by Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, A Tempest (for the sea under the city) by Bettina Malcomess, Chosi Instomi! by Koleka Putuma, eMalahleni  by Qondiswa James, and And Then the Sea  by William Harding. Each focused on different production elements, from a purely visual experience where the audience watched the cast in a radio booth engaging in dialogue to a purely audio experience where each audience member could listen while sitting on a sofa or laying on a beanbag chair, such that the audiences were able to engage their senses in various ways with the work. 

The idea of recording ourselves, the idea of radio, tracks the development of us [Africans] telling our stories to each other and to the world, to whoever would listen.

Muyanga challenged audience members to bring their own experiences, knowledge, and ideas, so that the audience co-created the meaning of each piece. He connects the audience experience to his own past listening to radio dramas with his mother and grandmother as a child:

All those who were sitting around the wireless [radio], and I used to do this with my mother and grandmother… you are not only passively receiving the narrative; you are co-creating it. You are imagining the face of the character that is speaking. You are imagining what they are wearing. You are imagining the context in which they are living and acting. You are imagining the colors and the mood, the affect…and that is what was appealing to me about radio as an experience, and about dramas and radio plays… how emotional they make us, how involved they get us to be.”

As an audience member myself for three of the four plays, I felt that this provocation made this experience quite special and unique. In listening to World-Class African Citizens  by Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, which details a fire that killed seventy-seven people—mostly African immigrants—in August 2023, I was so moved by the screams and sound of flames consuming all in their path that tears flowed freely and I was unable to watch the next show.

Geneologies of the Visual Radio Plays

Muyanga found motivation for the project in “the idea of orality or aurality having been described by many theorists as the way that the pre-colonial psyche received information, versus the contemporary postcolonial condition where we take in a lot of our information visually. So, I’m interested,” he said, “in juxtaposing those two senses and seeing what’s revealed.” 

Added to these inspirations were Muyanga’s questions about “what it means for human beings and our contemporary society to be documenting itself.” In this he heavily references the work of German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist Walter Benjamin, as well as surrealist French radio pioneer Paul Derhame. He locates his own work within Benjamin’s grand ideas of culture and its place in the world, especially on “mechanical reproduction” from Benjamin’s "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"(1935). These ideas drove Muyanga to think through “what is going to ultimately change what we think of as the true work of art versus the copy; and the relationship to society, culture, and history; and where we see ourselves.” He extends Benjamin’s line of thinking, adding that, “the idea of recording ourselves, the idea of radio, tracks the development of us [Africans] telling our stories to each other and to the world, to whoever would listen.” 

For Muyanga, it is when one adds sound effects and combines music that reality amplified or altered. That power was deployed by liberation movements in different ways through the medium of radio. Muyanga notes that “the African National Congress (ANC) that was in exile in the 1960s, as they [went] underground, developed a platform called Radio Freedom as a way of broadcasting far and wide to people who would be sympathetic to their messages.” Radio Freedom’s programming included news and commentary on the armed struggle, as well as poetry that was aimed at motivating people to support the movement. Just as Radio Freedom’s station identification featured the spoken words "This is Radio Freedom, the voice of the African National Congress and its military wing uMkhonto we Sizwe," each of Muyanga’s Visual Radio Plays was introduced in a similar manner: the announcer would introduce the station as well as the show, evoking the nostalgia of that bygone  era of radio broadcast where the power and reach of the medium was used to reach the masses.

Radio Drama as Experiment

Working on this project at the Centre for the Less Good Idea allowed Muyanga the freedom to work with talented writers and performers, most of whom had not had the opportunity to work in radio before. This was an experiment on multiple levels, including “inviting writers… [to] think though the dramaturgy of sound and think about the place where the sound would be directed right at the beginning” and for “performers trained to be theatrical performers… now being asked to project to a microphone… and mimic talking to someone’s ear,” says Muyanga.

What is abundantly clear is that audiences (including this writer) who experienced the work in multi-sensory ways found it an engaging, interesting, and exciting experience. The invitation to participate in live making and re-making is something that goes beyond the conventions of audience interaction from conventional theatre plays and practices. In Muyanga’s words, “The idea was to start with a simple idea: a text that was driven by sound dramaturgy, and to bring together with this complex environment of interpretation live on stage…and there you meet the challenges of what part of the text can be translated effectively to give meaning.” This translation was enacted, for example, in eMalahleni by Qondiswa James, which did not have dialogue. As the actors moved around creating sounds on the foley table, I almost felt invited into the action. At several moments audience members would either share thoughts with each other without knowing that they were being loud, thus participation felt almost deliberately prompted by the performance.

Muyanga is cautious not to be presumptuous or claim that this project and its artistic outcomes are “new,” but he does begrudgingly agree that the Visual Radio Plays, project “offers a new language, a new impulse, and new terrain,” for what the genres combined in this project are and could be. It reinforces the idea that we are “connected to a global conversation around where to take theatre” as more writers, producers, and directors realise that what will keep theatre alive is innovation and a willingness to embrace new ways of creating.

The good news is that the Visual Radio Plays, In Conversation, and HOW | Showing the Making will continue. “We want to find out what still remains to be discovered for audiences [and] for ourselves as makers in the space of the cross-disciplinary, multimedia performance,” says Muyanga. However, he is hesitant to say or share what some of his other ideas for next iterations will look like are except that more work of such nature needs to be made and that there is interest from other partners who work with or want to work with the Centre for the Less Good Idea to make this happen.