Running until September 23, this year’s Drama for Life Sex Actually Festival will be hosted at the newly established Drama for Life Creative Research Hub in the heart of Braamfontein, at the iconic Wits University Corner Building.

Under the theme of The Body Politic: Beyond Headlines, Heartlines and Hashtags, the festival aims to challenge the symbolic interaction of ideology, value systems and principles embedded in tradition, education and popular culture.

It will do this through a series of theatre performances, film screenings, workshops, exhibitions, and conversations. Mental wellness, sexual identity and the complexities self, will also be addressed.

The curator of the festival, Caryn Green says that “this year, the festival and conversations hope to confront that which is feared, to understand it, and to respect that the overall health of the collective is a responsibility to be shared equally among citizens.”

The programme will showcase performances by the Drama for Life Theatre Company, Siphumeze Khundayi and Bongile Lecoge-Zulu, Drama for Life Playback Theatre, and the Hillbrow Theatre Project.

There will also be experiential workshops with drama therapists, applied drama facilitators, and public health practitioners, across topics of trauma and art therapy, LGBTI and spirituality, the psychology of violence, and  gender identity and sexual health.

Other highlights include Tswalo directed by Mahlatsi Mokgonyana and performed by Billy Edward, a keynote address by Zimitri Erasmus; Lover + Another poetry; a curated experience of the exhibition ‘Is That Okay?’; and a site specific performance of Afriqueer.

“Engaging with the enormous challenges of change in contemporary contexts; our work questions what it means to be human; how we can learn to be resilient, without compromising our humanity; and, in so doing, how we can effectively use the arts to bring about meaningful, sustainable social transformation and healing,” says Drama for Life director Warren Nebe.

The Drama for Life Sex Actually Festival is a cross-community arts education, activist and therapeutic intervention.

Responding to contemporary social contexts, it interrogates the complexities of sex, sexuality, relationships, culture, gender and sexual reproductive health; within a human rights and social justice discourse.