‘South African creatives deserve to own their work‘: Hungani Ndlovu

Hungani Ndlovu is stepping into a new creative era as he makes his directorial debut in the upcoming Cape Town run of Musical Chairs.

The two-time Naledi award-nominated dance-theatre production, to be performed at the Magnet Theatre from August 19-23, takes a familiar childhood game where players race to find a chair when the music stops and transforms it into a metaphor for modern life and the increasingly complicated relationship with social media.

Aside from being the director, Hungani takes on the role of executive producer and is also a member of the cast.

“Honestly, it forced a kind of discipline I didn’t have before. As a performer you’re inside the moment, feeling it in your body. As director, you step back and see the whole stage — the shape and the story. As executive producer, you’re thinking about budgets, venues, etc, and switching between these hats constantly means you can’t hide behind any of them. It made me more decisive and more compassionate toward the cast because I know exactly how hard it is to take a note while you’re still inside a performance,” Hungani told TshisaLIVE.

The core premise of the play asks, “When the music stops, will there be a chair for you?” Being in an industry as competitive as South African entertainment, Hungani says doing more than one thing has helped him navigate that pressure to stay seated.

“Early on I think you believe you need to be the best at one thing — the best actor, in my case. That’s exactly the trap Musical Chairs is about — chasing a single seat everyone else wants too. For me it’s been about securing a few chairs: acting, dancing, DJing, content creation, producing and directing through Rush Productions, the work I do with Saga (SA Guild of Actors), and so on. So, if the music stops on one, I’m not standing in the middle of the room with nothing.

“The other part is, my ‘why?’ The pressure to ‘stay seated’ gets loud when you’re chasing relevance for its own sake. It gets quieter when you’re actually building something — a story, a company, a community — because then the work has its own reason to exist outside of whether you won that round of musical chairs. That’s not to say I don’t feel the pressure, everyone in this industry does. But I’ve learnt to treat it as noise to manage, not a verdict on my worth.”

Having been in the entertainment industry for more than a decade, Hungani has grown from strength to strength — but that has not stopped social media trolls questioning his talent, especially as a dancer.

“It’s part of the noise that comes with being a public figure. The moment you’re visible, everyone feels entitled to an opinion about you. I’m not as bothered as people may think. What keeps me going is remembering that criticism from someone I don’t know, who’s never trained with me, and has never stood in a rehearsal room bleeding into a routine with me, doesn’t actually carry the weight it wants to carry. It’s easy to type a comment; it’s a different thing entirely to build a body of work.”

In July 2023, Hungani took over the role of Thabo “Tbose” Maputla on Skeem Saam from Cornet Mamabolo.

Tbose’s current storylines have involved heavy emotional drama, marital strain and high-stakes tension, but with Hungani’s other commitments, he finds a way to prepare for the fast-paced daily soapie shooting schedules while balancing theatre work.

“Between my agent and the Skeem Saam scheduler, we’ve found a rhythm that works. But it costs me sleep and family time, which is a sacrifice I make more often than I’d like.

“As for the emotional weight, I don’t really switch it off between scenes. I’ve learnt to carry a role’s intensity without carrying it home, which is a discipline in its own right. If anything, the pace of a soapie has made me sharper in theatre, because you learn to drop into a character fast and fully. Daily shooting doesn’t give you the luxury of easing in.”

Speaking on the state of show business, Hungani says his advocacy through his work with Saga comes down to one thing.

“South African creatives deserve to own their work and be paid fairly for it. That’s the whole fight behind the Performers’ Protection Amendment Bill and the Copyright Amendment Bill. Musical Chairs is me practising what I preach. If I’m asking the industry to do right by performers, I have to show I can run a stage that does the same.

“I find it difficult to celebrate certain achievements in the industry based on the foundation of those achievements not being grounded in fairness. There’s real momentum with the recent Constitutional Court developments on PPAB and CAB, showing that the legal ground is finally shifting in creatives’ favour. But structurally, the industry is still catching up.”

TshisaLIVE