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There's curently a unique version of the Bizet opera, "Carmen," at the Broad Theater in Santa Monica: a production in English with an all-South African cast and set in a township, where blacks were forced to live under white rule during apartheid.
The star of the show and co-founder of the Isango Ensemble, Pauline Malefane, shared her thoughts with The Frame about how she got into opera, and what it’s like to be appreciated on the road, but ignored at home:
I went to audition and I got in, and played the chorus, and in three weeks we’re opening "Carmen." They approached me and asked if I thought I’d be able to do the role, and I didn’t think about it and I said Yes. And I didn’t really think about it. I had three weeks, afterwards I thought, How am I going to learn the role in three weeks?
There’s a big pool of talent, and the amazing thing about South Africa voices is they sing can almost anything.
Opera, unfortunately, is still white dominated. You see black people on stage performing mainly in the chorus, but if you look in the audience it’s still very white. It's not even white [and] young, its white [and] old, which is quite sad because what that means is we’re losing the audience. At some point we’re going to run out, because at some point they won’t be able to come into the theater.
This is what we strive for at Isango: yes, we want to entertain, we want people to enjoy the singing and story, but we want people to relate to what is going on, and not feel this does not speak to [them]. This is why we don’t use traditional orchestras, it’s not because we don’t want to, but it's because we want to draw a different kind of audience and get more people to come and see the township where we come from. So at the beginning you see people playing the marimbas, for overture, and then people will slowly go to into the places they need to go to.
So we choose stories like "Carmen" where "Carmen" could be anyone, she could be a woman from the townships, from Santa Monica, she could be the princess of England.
We don’t get any support from anyone in South Africa, we get to live through these tours we do. It’s not strange, it’s sad, it’s very sad. Because people would ask, "Where do you perform in South Africa?" And you say, “Nowhere. We don’t perform anywhere in South Africa, we only perform outside South Africa.”
And no one knows us,and people are really not interested because we are doing what’s beneath them, so to speak. We’re not really in the good standard for opera fanatics, and we’re not really theater standards, we are something in-between. It’s really is quite sad.
The Isango Ensemble performs "uCarmen" at The Broad through Oct. 10.