Word: zulu
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Umabatha, the current revival of the 1970 play by South African playwright/director Welcome Msomi, is such a remarkable amalgam of widely different cultures, goals and modes of performance that it's difficult to know how to approach an assessment of it. Enacted entirely in Zulu by performers in traditional Zulu attire, Umabatha* is at once a history lesson, a dance-and-music spectacular, a celebration of Zulu culture and--last and, theoretically, most important--a reworking of Shakespeare's famous tragedy Macbeth...
...culture" in a format that might easily be understood by the rest of the world. Msomi's epiphany came when he realized that the political background of Macbeth-- the half-mythologized atmosphere of the warring clans of medieval Scotland--was eerily similar to that of the birth of the Zulu nation, united out of many warring tribes under the great 19th-century leader Shaka Zulu. Moreover, Shaka's life was oddly parallel with that of Macbeth: a diviner prophesied in his youth that Shaka would become a "chief of chiefs," and his wife, Pampata, was his ablest and most ambitious...
...rather curious beast, and one isn't sure exactly what to make of it. Umabatha sticks fairly close to the main points of Shakespeare's text, retaining its great scenes and its characters, but, of course, those characters and the story itself undergo a process of transformation into a Zulu context...
...very first scene, for instance, introduces us to the famous three witches of Macbeth--who in Umabatha have become Sangomas, or Zulu diviner-women. rattling bones across the ground to tell the future and chanting maniacal melodies as they dance around their fire, the three Sangomas retain their function as eerie, ambiguous messengers of the world beyond, even as they are transformed into traditional icons of Zulu myth...
...Harvard-Radcliffe Kuumba Brothers opened the show with a rendition of the South African national anthem in Zulu, "Nkosi Sikeleli Africa," meaning "God Bless Africa...