Living positively

What three-letter word is the pinnacle of human intimacy? The very same word evokes immeasurable levels of emotion that can lead rational people to become irrational, and that same act can lead to making choices which could alter the course of one’s life? Sex, actually.

How does education, health and the performing arts merge holistically around the topics of sex, relationships, tolerance, gender and HIV and AIDS? Drama for Life (DFL) Sex Actually Festival is how. The fourth annual DFL Festival - taking place between 31 August and 9 September, in various greater Johannesburg venues - is an incomparable HIV and AIDS initiative which utilises health, visual and performing arts coupled with education to foster a tolerant, understanding and accommodating community. Sex Actually can be found at Wits University, UJ (Kingsway and Bunting Campus), Hillbrow Theatre, Soweto Kilptown Youth Foundation, Sibikwa Arts Centre, The Bioscope, Rainbow Sparrow Village and the Goethe Institut.

This year’s groundbreaking Sex Actually Festival aims to tell stories. Our stories. Human stories.  It engages with issues such as sensuality, sexuality, love, humanity and relationships, which have often been separated from this pandemic, and therefore either negated or simply are not considered to be pivotal in how we as a community need to take responsibility for this disease, and how it effects and affects us. 

To whet the appetite of the health and education fraternities, they can look out for productions such The Visionaries, by a troupe of visually impaired performers; Working The City: Experiences of migrant women in inner-city Johannesburg, which is a photographic exhibition put together by sex workers who were loaned digital cameras and partnered with photojournalism and documentary photography students from the Market Photo Workshop; then there is Sex? Yes, Thanks!... which uses critical laughter to address the consequences of sexual education and information in a conservative and hypocritically puritan society in which sex is taboo; The Revolution Between my Thighs explores the entrance of a trafficked person into the sex industry; and the aptly named Virgins Do Not Cure HIV and AIDS, It’s a Myth, deals with exactly what the title refers to.

In addition, intelligent and entertaining dialogue will take place in the form of dance, theatrical performances, interactive workshops, site-specific installations and Interactive Theatre Interventions. Dance enthusiasts should look out for Amagwinya (directed by Sello Pesa and Vaughn Sadie), Tracey Human and Renos Spanoudes’ collaboration on a new piece called Congruent and Love Happened Here by Warren Nebe; director of Drama for Life, which takes place in taxis travelling through Braamfontein.

There will also be the DFL Lover + Another National Poetry Challenge. This exciting challenge hears the voice of the youth as they battle it out around their realities, specifically around multiple sexual relationships and HIV and AIDS. The countrywide DFL Lover + Another Challenge will culminate in the regional finalists from Cape Town, UKZN, Grahamstown and Gauteng going head-to-head in the National Grand Slam on the 2^nd of September at the Wits Theatre.

As the DFL Sex Actually Festival prompts communities to stop living in silos and interact as one in ways that can only result in a transfer of expertise and knowledge, expect comfort zones to be challenged, expect to laugh and expect to be open to talking about, hearing about and engaging with sex, actually.

The DFL Sex Actually Festival is open to everyone, and is suitable for adolescents, youth and adults. For more information on programming schedules and events for the DFL Sex Actually Festival, log on to www.dramaforlife.co.za, or find us on Facebook and twitter. Tickets start from a mere R10.00

For more information contact the DFL Festival Office on : 011 7174726/34 or email: Levinia.jones@wits.ac.za or jmborton@gmail.com