27 Trail-Blazing Fire Guardians Are Stepping Into The Limelight At This Year’s Edition Of “Constellations”

Guests will watch three mesmerising fireside performances put on by their campfire hosts, the Fire Guardians. With a selection of 27 Fire Guardians in total, guests will only discover over the course of the evening which three they’ll be sharing a fire with.

Meet the new Fire Guardians:

Gaëtan Schmid
Gaëtan is a Belgian theatre artist currently living and working in South Africa. He produces, creates, writes and performs his own excitingly original one-man-shows including: Body Language I & II, The Belgian and the Fleur du Cap-nominated Rumpsteak. A graduate of the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France, he has performed all over the world.

Dizu Plaatjies
Dizu is a neo-traditional African musician and head of African Music: Practical Studies at the University of Cape Town’s South African College of Music. He is the founder and former leader of Langa marimba group Amampondo, which put traditional South African music on the international map in the 1980s, and a College of Music alumnus. On leaving Amampondo, he started a new ensemble, Ibuyambo, with which he has toured the world for the past decade. He and Ibuyambo are the recipients of two South African Music Awards (SAMAs) for the albums African Kings and Ubuntu – The Common String.

FreeMan LoTS
FreeMan LoTS says: “The music that I make calls on the idea of an Ancient Knowing. Of a time when we knew Tribe as essential to our Human Experience. Using a combination of Indigenous, organic instruments, Spoken Word and Affirmative Expression, the sound invites you to journey inward and discover the power that resides within you.”

Moodship
Moodship (aka Gary Thomas) is one of South Africa’s most celebrated solo musicians. His unique style blends rich, moody song writing with a vast array of alternative guitar techniques and precision multi- tasking. Thomas has toured all over South Africa and Europe. He is an award winning live performer and music producer for film, documentary, TV and theatre.

Jak Tomas
Jak Tomas (the artist formerly known as Joshua Kenneth Grierson) is a self-taught multi-genre singer, songwriter and producer from Cape Town. Since starting his first band in 1997, Jak has been a part of a number of acts covering a number of genres and instruments. In 2015 he built a humble studio in his bedroom and started DJing and. Here he recorded his debut album (as Jak Thomas), Of Love & Anxiety, released mid 2020. Jak is an authentic, passionate and uncompromising artist; an artist that wants to tell you a story.

Lindy Dlamini (ancestral name: Gogo Masechaba)
Gogo is a mother, integrative healer, writer, facilitator and life coach. She grew up in Kwa-Thema (Gauteng) and has called Cape Town home since 1993 when she moved there to study at the University of Western Cape. Gogo is a practising sangoma (initiated in 2006) and facilitator in social development research. She has a deep passion for Indigenous Knowledge Systems , self-mastery and community healing. Her work is centred around creating and holding safe spaces for people to acknowledge, tell, process and heal their stories through ritual and ceremony.

Liza Scholtz
Liza Scholtz is an actor and writer/poet. She has acted in various productions both locally and internationally, most recently in the psychological thriller The Good Madam, which will be released later this year. She has also played Mrs. Shah in Trackers, Lisa in Die Vlieende Springbokkie and Tatianna in the award-winning feature film High Fantasy, which she also co-wrote. Liza received her Honours cum laude in acting for screen at AFDA. She has been selected as one of the 2021 winners for the international Button Poetry Video contest. Her first poetry book, in collaboration with illustrator Hakopike, will be released this December.

Louise Westerhout
Louise is a queer, disabled poet, therapist, performance artist, curator, educator, Reiki master and yogi. Her work is dedicated to themes of illness, body, consciousness, post-humanism, anti-speciesism, sexual abuse and misogyny, trauma and healing, social justice/environmental activism.

Malika Ndlovu
Malika Ndlovu’s words and performances have appeared in various online platforms, on pages and stages across South Africa and globally for over 25 years. She has published two plays and five poetry collections, edited and mentored several emerging writers’ works, and curated numerous multimedia events around and beyond poetry. As an applied arts practitioner consistently promoting healing and grieving well through creative expression, she is a member of the national Arts in Psychosocial Support CoP (community of practice). Malika's next book Grief Seed will be published in early 2022.

Manu Grace
Manu Grace has never imagined doing anything different: it’s always been music. Song-writing is her way of reflecting – making sense (and making fun) of her life. There’s a distinct playfulness to her approach, and she makes music from a very open, vulnerable place. She says: “There’s nothing that makes me feel more connected; like I know what I came here to do.”

Megan Choritz
Megan Choritz is a South African born playwright, actor, writer, director, facilitator and improviser. She has spent all of her life involved in theatre and make-believe. She has written and co-written numerous plays and musicals, novels and short stories and has recently published her first rhyming children’s book The Big Bird Battle. She is currently waiting to hear if her screenplay will be made into a movie. Hold thumbs.

Miles Sievwright
Miles Sievwright is a singer-songwriter based in Cape Town. He plays with complex rhythm as he weaves melody into his songs: Western folk pays tribute to West Africa, and often sitar-like improvisations evoke an Eastern touch in his fingerstyle guitar playing. His lyrics flicker to throw light and cast shadow on the familiar, presenting them with a veneer of mythical substance. Motivated by the sincerity of a song’s ability to communicate meaning, Sievwright plays with the delicate line between performance and self-expression and often deep-dives into his songs eyes closed, all in. One may expect a hauntingly honest performance from him.

Nico Athene
Nico is a body of colliding personas: a multidisciplinary artist, birth doula, embodied practitioner, and ex-sex-worker. She is currently completing her MAFA at the University of Witwatersrand, where she is exploring identity beyond the tradeable, and the opportunities for relationship in “capitalist wastelands”. She has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Centre, Arteles in Finland, the Santa Fe Art Institute USA, and Anybody Dance Lab in Cape Town.

Nkosenathi Ernie Koela
Nkosenathi Ernie Koela is a PhD candidate specialising in indigenous music therapies at the University of Cape Town. Using interdisciplinary practice encompassing being an Afrikan multi-instrumentalist, Koela explores how healing practices through sound creates space that manifests spiritually and materially. Koela has been a performer and instrumentalist for over 16 years. Alongside playing instruments he also teaches others how to play traditional instruments. He released his first solo ‘Inkaba’, an Afro-Spiritual collection of dreams and soundscapes (Brazil, Cape Town, 2018) and his second in 2021 (Embo Ethongweni).

Nwabisa Plaatjie
Nwabisa Plaatjie is a young storyteller from Cala currently based in Cape Town; nguMantsundu, uMngxongo, uSophitsho, uYemYem. She holds a Master's degree in Theatre and Performance from the University of Cape Town and is a Magnet Theatre Alumni. Currently she coordinates and curates the Baxter's Masambe Theatre, driving its relaunch as a space for performance, collaboration, mentorship and networking. She is also a global fellow of The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics housed in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

Odidi Mfenyana
Odidi Mfenyana is a multidisciplinary performing artist born in Cape Town. he started his professional career in 1994 at Artscape (then Nico Malan Theatre), going on to work nationally and internationally with South African theatre luminaries Roy Sargeant, Adele Blank, Michael Williams and Brett Bailey. His career has seen him work extensively on South African and international film and television. Currently one can find Odidi Mfenyana as his equally renowned nom d'guerre alter ego ODIDIVA on Netflix in the movie Angelina. Mfenyana is busy working on a production celebrating the lives of Nina Simone, Dinah Washington and James Baldwin.

Odwa Bongo
Odwa Bongo is a UCT graduate specialising in African Music. An alumnus of the Drakensberg Boys’ Choir and the Rainbow Academy, he gained national attraction for being a prominent young South African artist who plays the uhadi musical bow instrument to create a space of healing that welcomes all. Odwa’s hard work and love for his culture afforded him to collaborate with top-class local artists such as Dr. Latozi “Madosini” Mpahleni, Camagwini and Zolani Mahola.

Philippa Kabali-Kagwa
Philippa is a storyteller, poet, author and educator. She is the co-founder and host of The Story Club Cape Town and Balisa Nathi Storytelling Collective. She performs poetry, folktales and personal stories at festivals, conferences, schools, organisations and open-mics. She uses story, poetry and song to activate spaces, to comment, question, teach, invite and to create community. Her published books include Flame and Song: a memoir (2016) and Katiiti’s Song (2016); her poems have appeared in various publications.

Qondiswa James
Cape Town-based Qondiswa James is a theatre-maker, performance artist, film and theatre performer, installation artist, writer, arts facilitator and activist. She is currently studying her Master’s in Live Art, Interdisciplinary and Public Art at the Institute of Creative Arts. She has directed theatre works including Emhlab’Obomvu (National Arts Festival, 2016), Silindile (Theatre Arts Admin, 2018) and A Faint Patch of Light (winner of a 2019 Standard Bank Ovation Award). She is also currently a curator for the online stop-GBV+F campaign, Body of Evidence.

Rehane Abrahams
Rehane Abrahams is an award-winning theatre maker, performer and published writer currently engaged in PhD research at UCT. Both her practice and research focus on embodied decolonisation and rituals of healing for body and land. Rehane’s ongoing training includes performance at UCT, classical Javanese dance Surakarta style and Butoh with Min Tanaka at The Body Weather Farm, Japan. Rehane is also co-founder and co-director of The Mothertongue Project. The piece presented at Constellations 2021, entitled Intimate Reparations, is in collaboration with Wynand Herholdt – a camera operator, skateboarder, and tattoo artist.

Rod Suskin
Rod Suskin is well known as an astrologer and sangoma (African traditional healer) in Cape Town and has been in practice in both fields for over 30 years. He holds a BA (Psych) (Wits) and an MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology (Wales). He is the author of a number of books including Cycles of Life and Synastry and has his own show, Rod Suskin’s World, on CapeTownTV.

Siphenathi Mayekiso
Siphenathi Mayekiso is a storyteller and poetic mover. He draws creative inspiration from different aspects of life, abstract images, philosophy, ideologies and history at large. He is also fascinated by objects in space in relation to the body, and the inclusivity of what is not part of the body to move as one while telling a story. As an artist he is at a place where he uses body as a catalyst in negotiating dialogues around inclusivity and body politics, which circle the notion of being differently-able.

Tapiwa
Tapiwa is a generalist and a dabbler who pursues a bit of everything in the quest for happiness. He facilitates experiences that are restorative to the ego and is interested in platonic intimacy and how it shapes our existences.

Thandeka Louisa Mfinyongo
Thandeka Mfinyongo is a musician born and raised in Nyanga East, Cape Town. In 2017, she graduated with a Performer’s Diploma in Music and in 2018, graduated with an Advanced Diploma in African Music, both from the University of Cape Town. Thandeka specialises in two Xhosa instruments: uhadi (gourd/calabash bow) and umrhubhe (mouth-bow). She recently finished her Master’s in Music Performance at SOAS University of London, with a major in kora (an instrument from West Africa). She has performed on various stages including the Baxter Theatre and Artscape Theatre. In May 2018, she released her first single, “Wenza Ngabom”.

Thando Doni
Thando Doni, the Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre 2021, is multi-talented theatre-maker, writer, teacher and performer. He learnt his craft at the Media and Arts Access Centre and with the Magnet Theatre. He won Best Director at the Baxter’s Zabalaza Theatre Festival in 2012 for Mhla Salamana and was one of four 2012 Theatre Arts Admin Collective Emerging Director bursary recipients for young directors. He is the 2021 Standard Bank Young Artist for theatre. His credits as director include Utopia, Malanga Awafani, Heart of Redness, Passage, Umendo, Us ,Through Our Eyes and Isithyilelo.

Toni Stuart
Toni Giselle Stuart is a poet, performer, creative facilitator and healer. She listens for the forgotten and buried herstories and histories of mixed/coloured/creole South Africans, re-imagining and re-writing them so we see and know ourselves as whole. Her work has been published in anthologies, journals and non-fiction books globally. She collaborates, and performs across disciplines with filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, and dancers.

Wessel Pretorius
Wessel Pretorius was born in 1986 and grew up in Nelspruit. He obtained his BA Drama degree at the University of Pretoria and his Honours in Acting at Maties. He made his professional debut in 2010 at Aardklop with Korte Mette Met die Versamelde Werke Van William Shakespeare. His self-penned solo show Ont won four KykNet Fiëstas and the Aardklop Award for Best Actor. Other theatre highlights include writing and directing Renaissance (Alexander Bar Upstairs), Fotostaatmasjien (co-adapting Bibi Slippers’ poetry collection with the author for Woordfees 2018), The Gospel According to Jan Coetzee (NAF and Courtyard Playhouse) and Wilde-als (Aardklop).

For more information on the event and bookings, click here.