Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award Winner PIET SE OPTELGOED for Mother City Run

DonkerDonkie, in association with A Conspiracy of Clowns and Rhodes Drama, will tour Liezl de Kock's PIET SE OPTELGOED to the inaugural Cape Town Fringe Festival this year. PIET SE OPTELGOED won a Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award at this year's National Arts Festival and has been invited to the 2015 Amsterdam Fringe Festival. It is devised, designed and written by de Kock, and is performed by her with Lexi Meier. Sound and directorial composition is by Rob Murray.

PIET SE OPTELGOED is a dark and brooding nightmare peppered with unexpected humour, heart-breaking vulnerability and poignant humanity, told in the breathtaking visual style audiences have come to expect from de Kock. Gleefully deranged and a fringe dweller, Piet is at once a myth and a horror story told to children when they don't behave. Like a twisted pied piper, her lullaby calls weggooi-kinders from their beds to her kitchen; her hunger is insatiable. PIET SE OPTELGOED trawls the dark underbelly of society and the power and powerlessness of women in a warped comic broth of visual buffoonery.

De Kock has cemented herself as a versatile, sought-after and multi award winning performer in South Africa. As co-artistic director of A Conspiracy of Clowns, she has performed in all their works to date - PICTURES OF YOU, KARDIAVALE, BENCHMARKS and CRAZY IN LOVE - as well as in all of the Deafdand hearing integrated works of FTH:K, being nominated for the Fleur du Cap Best Actress Award for her role as the mother in WOMB TIDE. De Kock was also mentioned in The Sunday Times as one of the best actresses of 2010 in South Africa.

De Kock created DonkerDonkie as a personal platform to explore a moer-by of theatrical passions such as puppetry, object manipulation, contamination of materials, writing, visual arts and performance all at once. Of the creation of her new piece, she says, "Creating PIET SE OPTELGOED as part of an MA at Rhodes has been an unparalleled privilege. Having access to mentors and theatre luminaries such as Prof. Juanita Finestone-Praeg, Prof. Andrew Buckland, Illka Louw, and Rob Murray has made the work and the research rich and unrelenting. I have grown enormously during the process of working with women including Hannah Lax, Lexi Meier, Ananda Paver and Megan Grace Wright."

De Kock's co-performer, Meier, finished her Honours at Rhodes Drama in 2012 experimenting with scriptwriting, stage design and choreography. Currently busy with her first year of a Master's Degree in Choreography, she is interested in what happens when movement and materials intertwine in choreographic languages, and how the body can know space. Two major influences on her performances and work have been Illka Louw's UR (2013), and this piece which represents her first professional performance.

PIET SE OPTELGOED will be performed at City Hall 2 on 25 September at 17h30; 26 September at 12:30; 27 September at 17:30; 28 September at 21:30 and 29 September at 21:30.Tickets cost R60 and R40 (concessions).Bookings for the production, which has a 16+ age restriction, can be made at www.capetownfringe.co.za.

To post a comment, you must register and login.