Event information
Winner of the Silver Ovation at the National Arts Festival Makhanda 2025, Circle Song is a play about re-membering … spoken to the audience from a narrator’s perspective across an arc of time.
Written and performed by Ashley Dowds, with direction by Caroline Calburn, this 50-minute memory piece reimagines the ancestral stories of Irish and English immigrants who made South Africa their home.
Dowds, known for his work in Warrior (HBO), Recipes For Love And Murder, and Paul Slabolepszy's The Return of Elvis Du Pisanie, brings his considerable acting chops to this intimate theatrical experience.
Circle Song isn't just about one family's past—it's an invitation for audiences to engage with their own memories. It's theatre as meditation, exploring what it means to belong, to be human, and to navigate time's shifting landscape when the past refuses to stay buried.