13/04/2026
🇿🇦 🇨🇭 🇱🇸 VILLAGE HUB — AUDIO STORYTELLING 🎭✍🏾🎧🎙️🎶📽️
in partnership with the International Institute of the Arts (IIA) — UFS, with support from Pro Helvetia Johannesburg, the Swiss Arts Council.
Village Hub — Audio Storytelling is an immersive sonic journey that reclaims, reimagines, and repositions African oral traditions—Ditshomo—for today’s world. Rooted in the intimacy of the village fire, the project transforms memory into music, story into soundscape, and voice into a living, breathing archive.
Taking place at the Village Hub in Qwaqwa, Free State, from April to June 2026, the initiative unfolds as both a creative residency and a public-facing artistic process anchored in place, community, and cultural memory.
At its core, the project is a cross-cultural collaboration between South Africa and Switzerland, where storytelling meets music, and tradition meets innovation. Drawing from indigenous knowledge systems, personal memory, and collective histories, it shapes layered audio experiences that travel across borders, languages, and generations.
Led by renowned multi-award-winning theatre-maker and cultural producer Napo Masheane, the collaboration brings together: Erik Altorfer (Dramaturg & Director), Martin Schütz (Cellist & Electronic Musician), and Volley Nchabeleng (Percussionist & Musician). Together, they craft a multidimensional performance language, blending narration, rhythm, and sonic textures into an experience that is both intimate and expansive.
The programme engages 20–30 students across Drama, Literature, Humanities, Media, and Spoken Word. Working closely with community elders and local storytellers, participants gather oral histories and cultural narratives that are often under documented or at risk of being lost. These stories are then transformed into original audio scripts, with a strong focus on HerStory—centering the voices of women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ communities.
Over an intensive process, participants move from fieldwork to creation experimenting with voice, character, rhythm, and sonic texture culminating in professionally recorded audio works layered with soundscapes and archival material. The programme will culminate in the Village Hub — Audio Storytelling Installation, presented at the HerStory International Theatre Festival an immersive listening experience where sound, memory, and community history converge.
This creative journey is further extended through the Kingdom in the Sky documentary and the forthcoming film Lesotho – The Kingdom in the Sky, which trace both the artistic process and landscape, while foregrounding Masheane’s contribution to theatre-making, storytelling, and African feminist performance. Together, these visual archives serve as both documentation and expansion of the work, capturing memory in motion.
Village Hub — Audio Storytelling: Where Ditshomo travel from the village firelight, retold in soundscapes. University of the Free State 🎧🎙️🎭 Pro Helvetia 👼🏾🎶📽️🎭🎙️ Village Gossip Productions ✍🏾✍🏾✍🏾
