Eating to Live

A collaboration between South African theatre group Shoestring Productions and Nanzikambe, Eating to Live brings together performers from both countries to create a unique and revealing expression of poverty in Southern Africa.

To date, there has been very little theatre that probes the issue of famine. And there certainly has not been a professional theatre production that tells the story of the 2002 food crisis in Malawi.

Eating to Live is a comically dark tale about betrayal and death, that brings the personal and the political together, with an air of the macabre, a healthy injection of blunt tell-it-like-it-is humour, and haunting visual imagery.

What does food mean to people in the context of a food crisis? Food is sold, eaten, stuffed, stolen, wasted, used, enjoyed, relished, longed for. Food makes life possible; its absence causes death. It is used as a political tool; it is profiteered from; but it also exists in the imagination: binding people together.

Politically controversial, Eating to Live is essentially a family story set to a backdrop of the Malawian food crisis of 2002: a crisis that went almost unnoticed and in which thousands died.

This production looks at food, hunger and poverty in Africa with fresh eyes. It projects a life-affirming vision of rural Africa, whilst scrutinising the actions of decision makers. This is an intense, intimate, compact and daring production, that acts as more than just a testament to the tragedy suffered by millions of starving Africans; it does something even more important than that: it celebrates the traditional mechanisms of survival and endurance, whilst questioning the acceptance that it is normal, average and expected that people die, in their thousands, without seeing life past forty years of age.

Combining traditional story telling with rural and urban music styles and township percussion, Eating to Live taps in to the pulse and essence of modern day Southern Africa.

Eating to Live is narrated by a Chameleon, and in this story, the Chameleon represents the presence of death. A flood that destroys a maize field is portrayed by two enormous swirling blue cloths, the maize field brought on by the narrator; a powerful symbolic rape scene in which the daughter is attacked by a local businessman: the action is in slow-motion, the girl is represented by a chitenje, and the actress playing the girl sings a poignant lament whilst the other actors pound mortars with pestles.

Eating to Live is written and directed by Nanzikambe's Development Director Melissa Eveleigh. It was born of two of Eveleigh's previous productions for Nanzikambe: Chilly Heart, (acclaimed by Malawi's Nation newspaper, as "taking theatre to a new level" and "starting a Theatre Revolution in Malawi") and A Garden of Plenty which investigated the meaning of food in both Malawi and London, and was produced with Chancellor College students in partnership with the International Workshop festival at the Young Vic Theatre in London.

Eating to Live premiered at the Harare International Festival of the Arts in 2004.

This production has been made possible by the good will of Vukani Community Theatre in Johannesburg and the support of the National Arts Council, South Africa.