Tales of Ovid: Metamorphosis

Tales of Ovid: Metamorphosis is the final presentation of 8 final year Theatre and Performance students.

Tales of Ovid: Metamorphosis is the final presentation of 8 final year Theatre and Performance students. Six of these students have worked as performers and storytellers, while others have worked in stage management and dramaturgy. Facilitated by lecturer Kieran James Reid, the project and the process have been focused on the development of improvisation, storytelling skills and play between the students.

The culmination of this training is the staging of Ted Hughes’ excellent translation of a selection of the Roman poet Ovid’s classic stories. These are stories of gods and men vividly tracing moments of transformation and change with lots of sex and death where gods morph into animals, people into trees and everything into gold. All illuminate Ovid’s world with each story steeped in a moral lesson or warning, a world of mad and jealous gods and a natural order defying explanation. Maybe a little like the world we live in?

Ovid and Hughes have presented the performers with a vehicle to practice their improvisation skills and to play with notions of the actor’s transformations on stage. Their metamorphosis is not of a supernatural order, but the art of the changing storyteller who at one moment is a staged version of themselves, talking to the audience and in the next a pregnant woman morphing into a tree. The cast has worked with the dramaturge and Hughes’ text to create a series of short stories that exist in a variety of styles. Throughout the rehearsal process, improvisation and a mutually supportive cohesive ensemble were the goals.

The same is true of the performances.

In Tales of Ovid: Metamorphosis, the audience is invited to play this great game of improvisation with the ensemble. How this game will unfold is as unknowable as Ovid’s world with the storytelling ensemble deciding during the performance how to tell each story. Part of the process of creating this work was to allow the performers to own the stories and tell them in ways meaningful to the process of improvisation and the moment. By playing with and listening to the audience, they will relate these stories on a whim, and whimsically.

The set too has elements of the whimsical based on a design that will change every night with the creative choices our young storytellers will make.. These talented students have encompassed Hughes’ delightful and beautiful rendering of these ancient stories and embraced an improvised form of storytelling. The mythical, the supernatural, gods and men, the storyteller, the ensemble and the magic of bodies on stage all come together in this retelling of Tales of Ovid. 

Free parking is available in Senate House; the entrance is on Jorissen Street, Braamfontein.

Perfomance dates and times:
Tuesday 17 May – Witstix – 19:30
Wednesday 18 May – Opening Night – 19:30
Thursday 19 May & Friday 20 May - 19:30
Saturday 21 May - 15h00 & 19h30

Running time: Seventy minutes no interval

Booking: www.webtickets.co.za
Online                   
Full price-R45.00                            
Discount for students and pensioners-R30.00
WitsTix-R10.00                                                  

Door
Full price-R50.00
Discount for students and pensioners-R40.00
WitsTix-R5.00     

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