Dark Noon retells American history through a distant yet relatable South African lens

After rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and successful stints in Manchester and Copenhagen, a global, gruesome telling of history at last arrives in the land of the free, the very country the tale is about.

While it may have originated in South Africa, Dark Noon – which makes its U.S. premiere at Spoleto Festival USA on May 31 – is a devised theatrical piece inspired by Western films and American history.

“It is a story of how the Americas were built,” Dark Noon co-director and choreographer Nhlanhla Mahlangu said about the satirical work. “We have South Africans playing cowboys onstage and telling the Western stories but with South African nuances, and we throw in parallels like how capitalism, apartheid and slavery affect us all today. It’s a universal lens. We are telling someone else’s story.

“Our history has always been told by the victor,” he continued. “But what if…this history is being told by Black people this time and through Black people’s gaze?”

This question became very appealing to the South African actors Lillian Tshabalala and Mandla Gaduka, who not only perform in the piece but also helped create it along with Mahlangu and writer-director Tue Biering.

Mahlangu reached out to them in 2019 and, rather than have them audition (a process he hates), invited them to a two-day workshop where they would improvise, explore and act out prompts led by Biering. Those workshops and exercises became the beginnings of the Dark Noon script.

“It was so wonderful to have the freedom to play again,” Gaduka said. After years of working in television and film, he said, he felt his work became somewhat “stale.” While he admittedly was hesitant about not having a structured process in the beginning, he appreciated how the piece came together organically.

“It was wonderful that there wasn’t a set script already,” he said, “because it gave room for us to contribute and to also examine ourselves from the subject matter.”

Exploring links of pain and injustice

The subject matter of slavery, apartheid and violence in Dark Noon was somewhat triggering for Tshabalala, who said her mother grew up in the apartheid era that still affects their homeland today.

“I just think about how a lot of people die by the gun in my township, in my hood,” Tshabalala said. “And growing up, those are the [Western] films that we watched. The heroes, the white men, these are the people you need to look up to.’”

“Kumnyama emni” is the rough translation of “dark noon” in the South African language Xhosa, which is Mahlangu’s native tongue. He said the full expression means, “When the sun sets during the day is when the worst of the worst could happen.” He compared the meaning of the expression to the socioeconomic strife in his homeland.

“When people in my culture cry, they say, ‘And there it sets for me.’ And dark noon for me is noon but it’s dark. Maybe it’s bright for others, it’s glowing for capitalism – and it’s dark for the working class.”

Mahlangu also described a challenging rehearsal process with many tears, in part because South African and American history are inextricably linked.

“We know the patrol bombs, we know apartheid, we know the police dogs,” he said. “It is a shared experience of South Africa and America. By just being in the South African body, by carrying the South African DNA and standing on an American or European stage and telling an American story, it is a way for us to excavate our own stories that sit inside our bodies.”

Tshabalala explained that Dark Noon is in fact like “digging up a dead body.”

“We dig it up and place it at the top with a bunch of people standing over, and the body hasn’t decomposed,” she went on. “And everyone has a relationship with this body, and we all relate to it. And some people feel awkward, of course, as to why this body is being dug up. Wasn’t it buried deep enough? And some are like, ‘Oh, I want to learn about this body. I’ve heard rumors, but what happened?’ And some are like, ‘Finally we are going to figure out what happened with this body.’ It’s placing a mirror in front of each one of us worldwide and saying, ‘What is your relationship with the body? What do you feel about it?’ And we all must sit in those feelings for one hour and 40 minutes.”

The “digging up of dead bodies” begins May 31 at 7 p.m. in Festival Hall, with three additional performances on June 1 and 2.

Rayshaun Sandlin is an arts journalism and communications graduate of S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University