Double Duty for Rust CoOperative with ASHES and NAT at the Cape Town Fringe

The Rust CoOperative will stage two productions at the second Cape Town Fringe this year, ASHES, which will be performed at the Fugard Studio Theatre and NAT, which will play the Alexander Bar and Café's Upstairs Theatre.

Philip Rademeyer and Penny Youngleson are the founders and creative directors of the award-winning Rust CoOperative, a Cape Town-based theatre collective. Created in 2012 to create a playspace for young theatre-makers wishing to create new South African theatre works, Rademeyer and Youngleson aimed to tell the kind of stories that are not necessarily see represented on contemporary South African stages.

ASHES, which is written and directed by Rademeyer and performed by Stefan Erasmus and Jason Jacobs, explores the life of a young man through the eyes of six characters. When he comes out to his parents, they send him away from their small-town home to the city, in order to protect him and provide him with more opportunities. The man's entrance into adulthood and his growing relationship with the partner he meets in the city are paralleled with his idyllic childhood and his complicated relationship with his parents. A sudden, violent event ruptures the world of the characters, and they are forced to try and pick up the pieces in the void that remains.

The impetus for this hard-hitting two-hander is the ongoing violence against gays and lesbians in South Africa, specifically three excessively violent attacks on young gay men in the Western and Northern Cape in 2014, which mostly remained unreported in the mainstream media. ASHES examines systemic homophobia and the scourge of violence against young gay lives in our country, exploring the thin line between the personal and the political.

NAT, which is written and directed Youngleson and performed by Iman Isaacs and Richard September, is a multi-lingual performance (with Afrikaans as its vernacular, alongside English and isiXhosa) that uses text, movement and soundscapes. The play follows the lives of three adolescants in Grassy Park, rupturing in the sexuality and violence inherent in their community. They are the expendable children that populate our disadvantaged communities, children who are too poor to have a childhood.

Youngleson elaborates on her motivation for creating this piece:

I wrote NAT in 2014 after teaching at the Battswood Arts Centre in Grassy Park for 2 years. My time here has made me very aware of how many learners are subjected to micro and macro aggressions on a daily (if not, hourly) basis in the Western Cape public school system. How fences, gates, buildings, teachers, principals, school rules and prejudices are failing our children. I wrote this play in response to the fourteen year olds who have been told to leave school because they are pregnant. To the nine year olds who aren't allowed to come to school until their bruises subside... and they never do. To the little boys who are cuffed over the head and called "moffie" if they cry when they're bullied. By their teachers. To the ten year olds who get their first period and don't come to class because there isn't money for sanitary pads or tampons. To the eighteen year olds still in Grade 9 - without support or mentoring. We are failing a generation of children.

ASHES will be performed at the Fugard Studio on 24-25 September at 21:00, 26-27 September at 19:00, and 28 September at 21:00. Book for the show through the Cape Town Fringe website.

NAT will per performed at the Alexander Bar and Café's Upstairs Theatre on 29-30 September and 1-3 October at 17:30, and 4 October at 19:30. Book for the show through the Cape Town Fringe website.