Spend an evening with Qondiswa James as she shares confessional stream-of-consciousness prose, original songs, and poetry. Stripped of spectacle and closer to the page and the body, this intimate performance creates a space for shared reflection – exploring memory, longing, and becoming. Tender and personal, it invites a gentle communion between performer and audience.

Bio
Qondiswa James is a freelance cultural worker living in Johannesburg. She is an award-winning writer, performer and theatre-maker, performance and installation artist, arts facilitator, scholar and activist. Her work engages the socio-political imagination towards mobilising transgression.

She has staged public art interventions at Infecting the City Cape Town, Live Arts Festival, FNB Art Joburg, Centre for the Less Good Idea, Les Rencontres a L’échelle (France), Arcade (Makhanda), Live Art Network Africa, AiiA Festival (Switzerland), Suidoosterfees, A4 Arts Centre (China), UCT’s Work of Arts Committee, and Wits University’s Towards Critical Apartheid Studies.
Her installation work has been exhibited at Spier Light Art Festival and the Stellenbosch Triennale. Her onscreen appearances include High Fantasy (DIFF 2018 Best South African Film Award, Artistic Bravery Award), and Letters from the Continent (Holland Film Festival 2021).

In 2024 she was a resident artist at the A4 Artist Residency in Chengdu where she collaborated on a digital hybrid performance, Youth in History.
She has directed theatre works including A Faint Patch of Light (winner of a 2019 Standard Bank Ovation Award); her original play A HOWL IN MAKHANDA (Fleur du Cap Award 2022 Best New Script, Best Original Composition); and an original solo work, Retch (Naledi Award 2024 Best Performer on the Fringe). In 2024 she staged a new play, Amaxelegu, at Market Theatre under their play development programme. In 2025 she directed a new work in progress, Dump State, about homelessness and evictions in the tidy City of Cape Town.