Artists Forum: Shakespeare to Gaza

The Artists Forum, convened at the Centre for Humanities Research, emerges out a longstanding conversation between artists and academics working in and through the CHR. The Forum’s objective has been to connect scholarly exploration with the CHR’s Artist in Residency programme, and to bring artists and humanistic study into a more intimate adjacency.   

This Artists Forum is based on Tauriq Jenkins and Megan Choritz’s Shakespeare to Gaza. A reading of The Gaza Monologues, monologues written by children who experienced the horrors of the 2012 and 2014 bombings of Gaza, inspired Megan and Tauriq to create, rehearse and perform Shakespeare to Gaza, a performance made up of Shakespearian monologues and Gaza monologues. The first performances took place in Cape Town on 31 December 2023 and 1 January 2024 with a cast of nine performers. Since then, Tauriq and Megan worked with actors in KZN to create another version of Shakespeare to Gaza for a performance during a Human Rights Art Festival, and various smaller versions have been performed in and around Cape Town. Shakespeare to Gaza is an artistic response to the Genocide.

Megan Choritz

Megan Choritz is a South African born playwright, actor, writer, director, and improviser. She lives in Cape Town and shares her home with furry animal people. She has spent all her life involved in theatre and make-believe. Megan graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1986 and worked as an actress before starting her own improvisation troupe in Cape Town. She has written and co-written numerous plays and musicals, performed and directed theatre, and she improvises and teaches improv.  She also writes short stories, and poems and children’s stories. Her plays The Tent, Drive with Me and Clouds Like Waves have achieved critical acclaim. Her debut novel Lost Property published by MF Books in June 2023 and her children’s book The Big Bird Battle, published by Penguin Struik have both received critical acclaim. Since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, Megan has shifted her focus to activism, and Shakespeare to Gaza has been the flagship project that integrates theatre and Palestinian solidarity.

Tauriq Jenkins

Tauriq Jenkins is an artist, academic, and human rights activist. He is the convenor of Save our Sacred Lands, an intersectional campaign that aims to protect heritage resources under threat with regards to Indigenous, First Nations, including San and Khoi communities. He is a founding artistic director of the Independent Theatre Movement of South Africa, and Shakespeare In Prison South Africa which trained actors in South African prisons. Tauriq holds an MFA from Columbia University, and was an International Foreign Policy Fellow at the School of International Public Affairs, at Columbia University. Tauriq has also served as a Section 11 Human Rights monitor for the South African Human Rights Commission and is an accredited Human Rights Defender with the Southern African Human Rights Defenders Network and Frontline Defenders, The International Foundation for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders.  He is the chair of the A|XARRA Restorative Justice Forum, a member of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, Salt River Heritage Society, High Commissioner of the Goringhaicona Khoena Council, and interim chair of the South African Palestinian Arts and Culture Coalition (SAPACC).