The Soil.Image:Supplied
Award-winning and much-loved acapella group The Soil have been added to the line-up of the highly anticipated Folklore Festival set to take place at the National School of Arts in Johannesburg on 1 October.
The Folklore Festival is a celebration of African culture, customs and community and the creative force behind the project is none other than South African Music Awards-winning storyteller and singer-songwriter Pilani Bubu.
The festival is set to close off Heritage Month with a celebration that will be a diverse Pan-African creative offering from North, South, East and West Africa – a perfect family day experience.
The Soil, Napo Masheane and Nicky B join Pilani Bubu, Wanlov the Kubolor and Stevo Atambire from Ghana, Papillion Musa from Kenya and Leomile from Lesotho.
The festival was founded by Bubu.
“Folklore is the expressive body of culture shared and preserved by a particular group of people. It is inclusive of the traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth, in the form of tales, sayings, dances, proverbs, jokes and music captured through various art forms,” said Bubu.
“We believe that our African children need to identify with as well as see themselves and their greatness in the songs they sing, books they read, toys they engage with and media they consume.”
Folkore Festival will incorporate poetry, dance, books, toys and workshops for a jam-packed full-day experience which includes a performance and workshop by Napo Masheane.
Masheane is one of South Africa’s leading theatre makers and poets. Her provocative and humorous one-woman show “My Bum Is Genetic, Deal With It” and “The Fat Black Women Sing” saw her being named one of the top 100 youth in South Africa by the Mail & Guardian in 2007.
The festival will be an ‘all ages’ affair with Ethnikids, an online bookstore which specialises in children’s books that feature characters of colour in various South African languages and provide diverse material that children can relate to and identify with.
The National School of the Arts will perform its highly anticipated “African Reflections”. This celebratory musical journey of African and Pan-African music is sponsored by the South African Music Performance Rights Association (Sampra) through the Sampra Development Fund.