A Midsummer Ice Cream
A hapless band of would-be actors prepare to put on a show for a royal audience. What could go wrong?
Borrowing scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream, this short film features the multilingual talents of the Johannesburg Awakening Minds (JAM) ensemble. It is, as Nick Bottom says, a "sweet comedy" - like an ice cream on a hot summer's day.
Filmed at the Windybrow Theatre and the University of the Witwatersrand, A Midsummer Ice Cream is a Jozi story about artistic ambition: a tale that falls somewhere between success and failure, bringing laughter and disaster in equal measure.
The cast and crew of A Midsummer Ice Cream after a long day on set.
In 2021, the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre and How Now Brown Cow productions presented JAM at the Windybrow, a video series showcasing JAM’s repertoire of Shakespearean monologues and sonnets. Now, turning scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream into A Midsummer Ice Cream, the JAM ensemble continues its pioneering work in translanguaging Shakespeare. In this film, the group merges its collective linguistic repertoire (which includes isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Siswati and French) with Shakespeare’s early modern English.
Knowing that they may well be viewed by some audience members as “rude mechanicals” - untrained actors whose performances are to be tolerated rather than admired - the JAM members subvert such condescension through knowing self-parody, from the moment that the stage hopefuls gather outside the house of Peter Quince to their “triumphant” performance in the final scene. Much hilarity ensues!
The scenes performed in A Midsummer Ice Cream were directed by Lwazi Mayeki and feature JAM members Michael Mazibuko, Innocent Mavimbela, Christian Sosibo, Tshiyeya Kalombo Louis, Gift Ntlemeza, Andile Nhlabathi and Bonga Dlamini. The film was shot and edited by Keaton Ditchfield of Ditchfield Productions. Additional support for this project was provided by the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa and the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
The release of A Midsummer Ice Cream is timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the launch of JAM by founder and Artistic Director Dorothy Ann Gould. Congratulations and thank you, Mam’Dorothy!
