PROFILE: NEW HORIZON THEATRE COMPANY
The New Horizon Theatre is a theatre company based in Harare. Its members are young actors and actresses who have graduated either from CHIPAWO and its various performing groups or from the Zimbabwe Academy of Arts Education for Development with a Diploma in Performing Arts or a Diploma in Media Arts from the Midlands State University in Zimbabwe.
The company represents not only a new horizon but also a new breed of trained and experienced young performers, who have been in performance since they were very young and have many stage appearances under their belt. The company came into existence when the performers who had been active in the Harare Youth Theatre joined forces with other CHIPAWO graduates, some of them already employed by CHIPAWO, to form a theatre company. Many of the members had taken part in various CHIPAWO productions when they were still in CHIPAWO, including Meeting Place 2000, and also in the Wills and Inheritance Laws Campaign, when they performed four plays relating to wills and inheritance nationally. Some of them had gone on to join the first intake in the Academy’s diploma programme.
In the period before the formation of the company, the Academy secured a number of contracts from organisations such as UNDP for plays on various relevant themes such as poverty and peace. Stephen Chifunyise wrote the scripts and directed the young graduates in these productions. CHIPAWO was also attempting to establish Zimbabwean repertory youth theatre at the Reps Theatre in Harare. A one week long run of the play, Vicious (2003), was staged there and this was followed by another run of two weeks of the same play. Vicious turned out to be a masterpiece of the Zimbabwean theatre and the young actors more than did the play justice.
The same cast went on to stage another of Chifunyise’s plays, Soul Sister Comes to Africa (2004), also at Reps Theatre. It was during these performances that the young members of the cast decided to establish themselves as New Horizon.
New Horizon’s next play, The Little Man of Murewa (2005), adapted from Hans Christian Andersen’s story, ‘Little Claus and Big Claus’, was an ideal vehicle for this company. The material was closely related to their own experience and all of them would have been exposed to the characters and situations the play depicts. The actors in the New Horizon Theatre, as they are graduates of CHIPAWO, are extremely versatile and the play afforded ample opportunities for music and dance.
The Little Man of Murewa premiered at the Harare International Festival of the Arts in 2005, had a two week run at the Reps Theatre, Harare, and then was performed in Denmark at the Meeting Place 2005 Theatre Festival in Esbjerg as well at other venues in Copenhagen, Jutland and Zeeland. The company is adept at conducting workshops with children and performing music and dance. While in Denmark they gave numerous street performances, concerts and workshops.
In 2006, as part of the Ibsen Centenary commemorations, New Horizon staged a Zimbabweanisation of Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic poem, Peer Gynt, entitled A Journey to Yourself. It too was premiered at the Harare International Festival of the Arts and went on to have a two week run at the Reps Theatre, Harare, in repertory with a new production, an adaptation of Charles Mungoshi’s classic novel, “Waiting for the Rain”.
After the season at Reps, A Journey to Yourself toured to Masvingo, Gweru and Kadoma where it sparked a lot of interest and lively discussion with large school audiences. In the same year, actors from New Horizon presented extracts from four of Ibsen’s plays at the main commemoration of the centenary at the National Art Gallery.
The following year happened to be the centenary of the death of the Norwegian composer, Eduard Greig, who had written a popular musical composition inspired by a play by Ibsen entitled the Peer Gynt Suite. The Embassy was sponsoring a musical duo, who played classical music on piano accordions, to the festival. Included in their performance was to be the Peer Gynt Suite. The Embassy suggested a collaboration between New Horizon, who had acted the play, and the musicians who were to play the music. The result was an exciting and challenging collaboration which fused the music of Greig with dance, poetry, dialogue and mime.
In 2007 there was no season at the Reps but in addition to the Peer Gynt Suite, New Horizon revived the earlier play, Soul Sister Comes to Afrika with a new cast for the Onstage television series (see below).
As a result of the interest that the Ibsen Centenary had aroused in Ibsen’s writing, a play of his was included in the ‘O’ Level syllabus, A Doll’s House. A local publisher, Weaver Press, published the text and New Horizon decided to perform an adaptation of the play itself. The Norwegian Embassy supported a combined Book Launch cum Opening Night reception at the Reps Theatre and the play was performed for a week at the Theatre Upstairs.
In the first half of 2007, CHIPAWO Media launched a series of performances filmed on stage for television called Onstage. All the above plays featured on television in the series. In addition, two new programmes were developed for television and stage performance, In Praise of Afrika’s Children, based on a poem by the Kenyan writer, Micere Mugo, and Beautiful Zimbabwe, which was also performed in Singapore and Malaysia.
In 2010 New Horizon performed Rabindranath Tagore’s The Post Office and created a new play based on Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, entitled The Most Wonderful Thing of All, which was premiered at the “Ibsen Through African Eyes” workshop in Lusaka, in October 2010. In the same year, actors from the company, working wioth the political theatre group, Zambuko/Izibuko, participated in an international project, initiated by the Ashtar Theatre of Palestine, entitled The Gaza Monologues. In December 2011 a major production of Calderon della Barca’s The Dream of Life was performed in a Shona translation, entitled Mutambo Wepanyika.
After a long break owing to the internal and external factors, New Horizon performed a play adapted from Lu Xun’s The True Story of Lu Xun in 2019, which ran for a week at the Jason Mbepu Theatre in Harare. There are hopes of a new lease of life – see NEWS – as the company prepared to tackle a new play aimed at creating a professional theatre company.
Founding Directors
Stephen Chifunyise
Chifunyise is undoubtedly the foremost playwright in Zimbabwe, with many plays to his credit, a great many of which have been performed by different companies with great success all over Zimbabwe and a number of collections of his plays and stories have been published..
Robert Mshengu Kavanagh [McLaren]
McLaren has had a long career in theatre in South Africa, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe as an actor, director, playmaker, academic and author. His published works include South African People’s Play ed., Making Theatre, Ngoma: approaches to arts education in Southern Africa ed., A Contended Space: The Theatre of Gibson Mtutuzeli Kente and Robert Mshengu Kavanagh On Theatre.
