The Market Theatre’s Kippies Fringe Programme Returns With Bold, Urgent Storytelling
The Market Theatre’s Kippies Fringe Programme Returns With Bold, Urgent Storytelling
Productions will start running from June through to December 2025, offering artistic vision that platforms storytelling and artistic expression that refuses to play it safe. Audiences will be treated to musical and theatrical performances, alongside the programming of cultural provocations with the power to shift the stage and spark change.
Thematically, the curation that The Art Cave offers will open a door to themes of youth resistance, musical legacy, queer pride, ancestral healing and personal reckoning. “These themes aren’t just relevant; they are urgent. We’re living in a time where theatre must do more than entertain—it must interrupt, heal, educate, and transform,” states Philangezwi Nxumalo
According to Tebogo Malapane, the shortlisting and final selection of shows followed a careful consideration of submissions across multiple performance genres, ensuring that the Kippies Fringe lives up to the vibrant multidisciplinary legacy of the space. The aim was to arrive at a bold, experimental, intimate and transformative programme that sits boldly in the 50-seater venue adjacent to The Market Theatre building.
Malapane adds that curating the return of the Kippies Fringe is a surreal opportunity to prompt the future of storytelling. “As a creative deeply concerned with the evolution of theatre, I’m not here to replicate tradition. I’m here to stretch it, flip it, and reimagine it. Therefore, the Kippies Fringe is more than a stage, it’s a testing ground for the raw, the risky, and the radically new. It’s a platform where artists can be seen and heard before the world tells them who or how to be.”
For The Market Theatre Foundation, bringing back the Kippies Fringe is as much about creating opportunities for live-performance artists as it is about reactivating Kippies as a venue that has propelled many careers before. “Utilising Kippies as a fringe venue ensures professional support for up-and-coming performers and artists, while creating an alternative space to encounter new voices. Through this dual value proposition, The Market Theatre’s longstanding history as an iconic performance space lends itself to works that are still on the fringe, cultivating a fresh and dynamic layer of live-performance artists that could possibly feed into our main programming in the future,” says Artistic Director, Greg Homann.
Some of the performances lined up at Kippies include Jo’burg-based Mongezi Ntukwana’s award-winning satirical theatre piece, ‘The Hyena’s Tuckshop’, and Makhubalo Ikaneng’s ‘Halala Mr. Party’, through which the award-winning storyteller looks at how public joy is often used to mask deep pain.
Again, community-based storytelling will meet national visibility when KZN-based director and teacher, Masedi Manenye, travels to Jo’burg to present ‘Faces’, featuring a cast of University of Zululand alumni. The production emerges from the ‘Beyond the Curriculum’ initiative, an innovative platform championing professional theatre grounded in rural realities.
Meanwhile, a rib-cracking comedy affair awaits, as ‘The Jokeologist’ by Themba Nhlapo joins the Kippies Fringe. This show is a unique fusion of stand-up comedy, poetry, and live music, driven home with sharp wit, lyrical flow and soulful rhythms.
For more information and full line-up, visit www.markettheatre.co.za.
ENDS
The Market Theatre is a Division of The Market Theatre Foundation, an agency of the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture.
For media enquiries, please contact Bongiwe Potelwa (Publicist at The Market Theatre Foundation) at bongiwep@markettheatre.co.za or (011) 832 1641.
For reduced price block bookings of 10 or more and school groups, contact Anthony Ezeoke (Audience Development Specialist at The Market Theatre Foundation) at anthonye@markettheatre.co.za or 083 246 4950.