Thokozani Mhlambi & Friends

Name: Thokozani Mhlambi & Friends
Start: 2025-10-05T18:00:00+02:00
Location: Theatre Arts

Schedule

Sun, 05 Oct, 2025 at 06:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Theatre Arts | Cape Town, WC

Experience a genre-bending evening where tradition meets the future. Mhlambi plays a custom-made baroque cello and sings in isiZulu, blending the rhythms of African traditional anthems like indlamu and umtshotsho with the ethereal soundscapes of Afrofuturism.
Mhlambi will be joined by special guests, including violinist Edward Fungayi and dancer Darion Thorne, for a performance that is more than a concert; it’s an invitation to witness a stunning exploration of sound, space, and shared history.
With fellowships at prestigious institutions in Germany and France, and as an honorary member of the Vancouver Folk Song Society, Mhlambi’s influence spans continents. He has performed at renowned venues in Chicago, Berlin, New Orleans, New York, and São Paulo, but his return to Cape Town audiences promises an intimate and immersive experience.
The show coincides with the release of Mhlambi’s new single, “Plea for Africa,” a heritage piece originally composed by John Knox Bokwe. Mhlambi explains the influence of the piece on his work:
“Back in the 1870s, when there were not many pianos in South Africa, John Knox Bokwe, while at Lovedale Missionary Institute, started to compose music fusing the Western hymn-style with Xhosa lyrics. I consider John Knox Bokwe the Father of African composition. He is my role model as I imagine the music of the future.”
This new show at Theatre Arts is different from his large-scale operatic work, “Hail to the king,” presented at the Baxter in 2024. This performance is more playful, designed for the music and dance to mingle with the audience, creating an unforgettable evening of connection and collaboration.

Biography
Thokozani Mhlambi (Phd) is a musician, performer, inventor and community builder whose work has a reverence for the past and the future. Playing on a custom-designed, handmade Baroque cello with gut strings, Mhlambi creates innovative work, both for himself as a solo musician and for ensembles. He regularly plays with ensembles in South Africa and North America.
He has held fellowships at the University of Bayreuth (Germany) and Cité International des Arts (France). Currently he is involved in the Microtonal Music Studios research and study program in Helsinki (Finland).

In his album Zulu Song Cycle (2019), Mhlambi explores the limits of creative expression by blurring the distinction between European early classical music and African ancient sounds, this is in ways that defy the orthodoxy of his own classical education. Contending with orthodoxies and the rules they impose is what Mhlambi does best, by inverting, subverting what (to some) might be the norm.

Mhlambi has dedicated his time to retrieving historical sounds from archives, based on collections in Africa and elsewhere. The result has been compositions that reflects different epochs, different time zones in human evolution

He has an interest in the relationship between art and technology, an interest he explores through his research on African traditions of metallurgy. This has allowed Mhlambi to think about the nature of artistic expertise in correlation with metallurgical expertise, in his musical compositions. Chief amongst Mhlambi’s theoretical concerns is about thinking beyond the colonial sound archive, in imagining a sonic past and future.

In 2023, Mhlambi was invited to be part of the Reimagining America Program 2023, where he worked with youth string-players from the city of Providence (Rhode Island).
He is an Honorary Member of the Vancouver Folk Song Society and has also been a visiting lecturer at Simon Fraser University also in Vancouver, where he performed at the World Arts Centre. He has performed at the venues such as Elastic Arts in Chicago, Prachtwerk in Berlin, Minneapolis, New Orleans (Tulane), São Paulo, Maputo (Mozambique) and New York (Performa).
Website: thokozanimhlambi.com