mAnJE ! MaNJe: Raising urgent questions about technology’s impact on the now-now

“The pace of technological change is terrifying,” says Mwenye Kabwe, the Zambian-born actor who, with Jennie Reznek, co-wrote mAnJE ! MaNJe (an epic) award-winning 2024 theatre production that’s been revived for a run at the Baxter this month.

An extraordinary show that combines dance, drama, music and video projections, mAnJE ! MaNJe is a reimagining of the tale of Daedalus, the ancient Greek engineer and inventor, seen in an African context and in light of pressing current concerns.

The tale, which unfolds as a series of loosely interconnected episodes, is used to pose penetrating questions about the fate of humanity as we face the technological juggernaut whose terrifying onslaught Kabwe laments.

“Considering how fast things are moving,” she says, “we have no capacity to anticipate what kind of world our children will be living in.”

Already, Kabwe says, we are experiencing “what feels like an AI tsunami”.

“It’s the ‘just-keep-goingness’ of it which gives me heart palpitations. We seem to be in freefall, incapable of taking time to consider what we’ve done. If only we could pause the whole thing a bit – which is what Hermes tried to do and failed – so we can just catch our breath.”

Rooted in Greek mythology, mAnJE ! MaNJe might be a repurposing of ancient ideas, but they’re ideas that are given a critical spin, rewired and refurbished and filtered through a contemporary lens as it raises the spectre of manifold threats to humanity’s future.

Taken literally, “manje manje” translates to “now-now”, perhaps the most South African of all South Africanisms. “Now-now can refer to something that happened in the past,” says Mark Fleishman, the show’s director. “Or, if we say, ‘it’s going to happen now-now’, we mean it’s going to happen soon in the future.”

It’s a paradoxical phrase that rather cleverly parallels our human condition at a time when everyone seems to be distractedly going with the flow, twiddling with our phones and ignoring the pace with which technology is getting the upper hand.

The title also alludes to the multiple ways in which the show, with its invocation of various ancient myths, plays with time. And it underscores Fleishman’s notion that the future is already inscribed in the past, encoded into the matrix of history.

“For a long time I was very interested in the way the past impacts the present,” he says. “With this piece, we’re thinking about how the past impacts the future rather than imagining that the present just happens to be in the way.”

Fleishman explains that the show is centred around a number of mythic stories associated with the so-called Minoan civilisation on the island of Crete, dating from between 3,000 and 1,100 BCE.

Those myths, and the manner in which they intersect with the figure of Daedalus, have been “reimagined from an African perspective”.

While the stories aren’t necessarily part of a coherent, continuous narrative, a chronology is implied to the extent that they might be “understood as a cycle of stories”. It’s thus been possible to construct a kind of epic tale by putting the various fragments of story together.

The epic that’s been constructed travels across time, connecting ancient myths with a rather bleak sci-fi future. Woven into all of it, like Ariadne’s golden thread, are prophetic allusions to our current moment: the warming planet, the unchecked rise of technology, humanity’s plight in the face of a digital takeover…

It looks at some of the defining elements of the modern era. With plastic consuming our world, for example, it toys with the idea that we’re in the “Plasticene” (or Plastic Age) and therefore in the throes of our own self-destruction.

And it questions why so very little is being done to prevent such a downfall. Where, it wonders, is our modern-day Hermes?

It’s a new story anchored in an ancient one, says Fleishman.

“Daedalus loses his son through his own kind of hubristic belief that he can do what other people can’t do. It’s the idea of trying to transgress against human nature and fly.”

“We’re digging in the territory of these ancient stories and finding resonance with our current reality,” says Reznek. “I think in this piece, the character of Daedalus is absolutely an analogue for the likes of Elon Musk. He’s a stand-in for those tech guys who celebrate humankind’s incredible advances. But what’s frightening is that when the Nobel Prize for Science went to the creators of AI, they themselves expressed uncertainty about it. They’ve said we need to pause because we cannot calculate what the future of AI might be responsible for.”

Unfolding in the manner of an epic – multiple episodes that don’t necessarily logically cohere – mAnJE ! MaNJe is an expansion of an earlier project, This Death Here…, which Reznek and Fleishman created as an 11-minute epic for William Kentridge’s Centre for the Less Good Idea. Fleishman, who directed it, called Kentridge’s brief “confounding” – because “How do you make an epic in 11 minutes?”

But it was a challenge worth resolving.

Out of the ideas they played around with, there emerged a core insight from the “Ode to Man” speech in Antigone – that humans are able to do many fantastic things, but not defeat death. Woven into that was the central figure of Daedalus, the inventor whose son Icarus flew too close to the Sun.

Many of the ideas they developed for that original performance were inspired by illustrations by the artist Marcus Neustetter, created for the show’s backdrop animations.

“Marcus began drawing landscapes that weren’t like our natural world, but that seemed to have evolved out of a new set of organisms,” says Fleishman. “Instead of a natural environment it was a machine world.”

So, out of an idea that contemplated an evolutionary path that did not necessarily culminate with humans, there emerged the rather dystopian concept for mAnJE ! MaNJe as a show that prophetically laments the human condition in the age of machines, big data, AI and climate catastrophe.

Fleishman likes to think of the show they’ve created as a kind of opera.

“It’s difficult to pigeonhole. As soon as you say it’s one thing, then everybody tells you it’s not. On one level, I think of it as a kind of operatic epic. It has an epic structure. And the word ‘opera’ in Latin simply means ‘a work’. So, it’s just a work. But it also has music and singing and one thing about opera is that you just accept that it’s a kind of crazy world, and often jumps from one scene to another because you’re just going with the music. So there are those parallels here, too.”

To achieve what is effectively a large collaborative vision, Fleishman assembled a crack squad: Neo Muyanga composed the award-winning musical score, Craig Leo designed the production, Lungiswa Plaatjies is the musical director, and Ina Wichterich has choreographed it.

The show features Sibusiso Matsimela on double bass and Plaatjies playing marimba, with the vocal gymnastics of opera singers Zolina Ngejane and Luvo Rasemeni. On stage with Reznek and Kabwe are the dynamic actors of the Magnet Theatre Youth Company who perform as a tight-knit chorus, Neustetter’s visuals projected huge across a screen at the back.

Fleishman says he sees mAnJE ! MaNJe as “a kind of concept album”, something he’s emphasised by dividing each of the epic’s episodic components – the scenes, if you like – into “tracks”.

As much as the epic form is taken from ancient Western modes of creating drama, Fleishman believes there are inherent links with African theatre practices.

“The epic is on some level a very African form. We have our bards, who are the griots, and there’s a distinctly African way of telling stories with music and dance interludes – it’s a kind of storytelling using a performance style that’s opposed to the dialogic kind of enactment that Western theatre utilises.”

The show is a reminder that the ancient storytellers knew only too well the consequences of human hubris. And yet, like Icarus, there are plenty of contemporary politicians and tech-bro puppet-masters (like Musk and US President Donald Trump and their ilk) who seem hell-bent on flying as close to the sun as they damn well please.

And where does that leave us? What becomes of our shared future if we ignore the warning signs and dismiss the wisdom encoded in our enduring ancient myths?

For the creators of this show, the aliveness of theatre itself might contain a kernel of redemption.

“We’re in a tragic moment, you can’t pretend otherwise,” says Reznek. “Theatre provides a place of stopping for a moment to think. That’s something AI is not going to do: just stop for a moment and consider what’s going on.”

“Art has that capacity to interrupt a kind of automatism,” Fleishman says. “Theatre does what is, for most people today, so difficult: it stops you for the next hour or so, makes you unavailable. It compels you to switch off your cellphone, sit in that bloody seat, and unless you want to make a fool of yourself, to not walk out of the theatre. It asks you to spend some time with us while we show you something. It’s such a human community event.”

“It’s a way of being with other people in a shared moment,” says Kabwe. “Just coming to sit and watch with no expectations – so you can receive, witness and participate in this communal thing. I hope that’s what people feel: that we’re here together. When you leave, it’s still going to be crazy out there. But for this moment, we can hang out, be together for a while. I hope our show allows some pause.” DM

mAnJE ! MaNJe (an epic) will be performed at the Baxter’s Flipside theatre in Cape Town from 17 to 25 April 2026.