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ABOUT FTHK
About the Company
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About the Company

FTH:K is a young, ground-breaking theatre company that works in the field of Visual Theatre. Without a dependency on any one language, our work crosses cultural and linguistic divides and calls on audiences to Listen With Your Eyes. It has already won multiple awards, toured all over South Africa, to Germany, Argentina, and America, and in only 8 years, has reached more than 55 000 people.

We are also South Africa's premier Deaf and hearing theatre company with the goal of integrating Deaf and hearing artists, educators and audiences through shared artistic and educational experiences. From 2005 - 2012, we operated as the only full-time theatre company of its kind in the country, and in 2013 restructured in recognition of the changing environment of Arts and Culture both nationally and internationally. We have ditched the bricks-and-mortar elements of the company in favour of broader, more exciting programming, and are focussing strongly on international collaboration. With satellite offices in Cape Town, Grahamstown, and Washington, DC, FTH:K has adopted the idea of a global village and gone mobile!

FTH:K works include OfficeBLOCK, Benchmarks,Womb Tide, QUACK!, GUMBO, and its associated productions Pictures of You and Birds' Eye View; all of which have either won or been nominated for multiple awards, or received significant critical acclaim.


What is Visual Theatre?

Founding Artistic Director, Rob Murray, talks about the origins of FTH:K's signature style:

"While Visual Theatre is being practised globally, it is often subsumed into other theatre genres. After all, what theatre isn't 'visual' by nature? However, there is a growing trend within theatre towards work that avoids formal language as its vehicle for communication. Instead, as Daniel Pink asserts in his book A Whole New Mind, it calls on an immersion into six senses earmarked by the Conceptual Age we are moving towards:

1. Not just function but also DESIGN
2. Not just argument but also STORY
3. Not just focus but also SYMPHONY
4. Not just logic but also EMPATHY
5. Not just seriousness but also PLAY
6. Not just accumulation but also MEANING

In theatrical terms, this creates a singular and integrated experience for an audience member - she is engaged in a conversation of images that requires her presence to complete the theatrical contract. Leaving the event she is engulfed with a myriad of words she hasn't heard, questions that haven't been directly asked, emotions that were never there...because they have come from her own life and personal experiences. This allows for the theatre-real world continuum to actively sow the seeds for transformation, for change.

Put another way: the slow tumbling of a clown, the shadow of a light, the turn of a mask, the reveal of a set, or the breath of a puppet...all these occupy the same territory as the most considered and poignant piece of verbal poetry."

Listen With Your Eyes

NPO number

041-761-NPO

 

PBO number

930017738

 

Contact Details

General:

Email: [email protected]

Fax: 086 612 9649

 

South Africa:

Ana Lemmer

Phone: +27 (0)84 581 2864

Email: [email protected]

 

America:

Tanya Surtees

Phone: +1 540 817 1340

Email: [email protected]

 

FTH:K has Section 18A Status

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