Naked Girls Reading Johannesburg Presents I AM AFRICAN THEREFORE I AM at the Alexander Upstairs

Naked Girls Reading Johannesburg will present I AM AFRICAN, THEREFORE I AM, a live nude literary salon featuring readers from the Johannesburg and Cape Town chapters of the Naked Girls Reading movement. The 70-minute performance forms part of the POPupstairs season at the Alexander Bar, Café and Theatre, which takes place at the popular Mother City theatre venue this December.

Directed by Alicia Skead, I AM AFRICAN, THEREFORE I AM will celebrate African authors and stories. Writers represented in the show include Ameera Patel, CA Davids, Rebecca Davis, Phillipa Yaa De Villiers and more.

The readers at this edition of Naked Girls Reading will include Ms Lola Banks who is making her return to the stage, although she is not new to the naked scene. Reading since before she could talk, she enjoys a well-written fantasy, but has no patience for teen adventures or stories that feature vampires - especially not sparkly ones. Her bookshelf is littered with well researched and lyrical biographies of actors and whores.

She will be joined by Ms Penny Wise, a world-travelling tailoress with a voracious appetite for words and voyages across the sky. Caught up in an endless cycle of sentences and journeys of the imagination, she strives to get people to reignite their passion for reading. Penny Wise is an actress, an entrepreneur, a jester and a dance floor demon. She navigates with her heart but also uses a finely tuned bullshit detector as her compass.

Naked Girls Reading is a wondrously nude celebration of stories that has been described as the most provocative literary series in the world. There is something altogether more intimate about a woman reading in the nude. These thrilling and eccentric ladies will mesmerise audiences with tales from a range of novels, short stories and modern fiction and allow them to witness the delight and splendour of women who like to read naked. At each event, a small cast of beautiful ladies remove all of their clothing and read to an adoring audience. They read out loud to the audience, and the experience is one that is entertaining, magical, often funny, sometimes heart-wrenching and really very sexy.

I AM AFRICAN THEREFORE I AM runs from 7 - 9 December at 19:00 nightly. Tickets are available from the Alexander Bar website, with seats costing R120 if booked and prepaid online or R130 if paid on collection at the bar. For telephone enquiries, call 021 300 1652. The Alexander Bar, Café and Theatre is situated at 76 Strand Street in the Cape Town city centre and can be followed on Facebook and Twitter.