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This adaptation of Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying centres on Toloki, the professional mourner who moves through an endless cycle of grief and fragile hope. Newspaper becomes the key material and metaphor of the work – evoking public memory, history, and the lingering effects of apartheid.

Spread across the stage like a grave, the paper is gradually folded, torn, gathered and attached to Toloki’s body as the performance unfolds. In this ritual of making and unmaking, his costume is constructed in real time, becoming a second skin that absorbs and releases the weight of the stories he mourns. Staged in an intimate space where the audience sits or moves close to the performer, the piece invites spectators into a fragile, evolving landscape shaped by breath, gesture, and fragments of text from Mda’s novel.

Drawing on post-colonial thought, deconstruction, and post-dramatic theatre, the work replaces linear storytelling with an embodied, poetic score. The performance uses physical impulse and emotional memory to explore how violence, remembrance, and resilience continue to shape South Africa’s present. The result is a contemplative, image-driven encounter where the body and the newspaper co-create a metaphorical terrain and where hope emerges not as resolution, but as a flicker through the persistent folds of grief.