Surplus Circus / African Exodus

In African Exodus, seven South African singer-performers explore the migration stories of Bantu peoples through the Niger-Congo region—it’s a musical odyssey of Bantu songs with pulsating rhythms and plenty of humour.
But first there’s Surplus Circus, where it’s all about taking risks and playing around—just like is done at the Centre for the Less Good Idea—taking seemingly unfinished ideas from African Exodus and improvising them with Komische Oper musicians to create brand-new musical narratives!


Surplus Circus
Sixteen artists, musicians and performers, from both the Centre for the Less Good Idea and Berlin’s Komische Oper, are given just five days to undertake this wild ride into the world of Surplus Circus. This experiment sees the German opera world meeting up with South African musicians as they plunge into an intense dialogue of both music and performance. The result is a powerful evening of circus-like brilliance, turning the limelight on ‘surplus’ ideas—those seemingly leftover glimmerings that have yet to become part of a finished piece but nonetheless have the potential for pure magic.

African Exodus
Where do we go looking when the history books leave us hanging? Where can we search for clues? The footprints of the Bantu migration have faded away. African Exodus is a rhythmically exhilarating and physically electrifying quest for the roots and milestones of the Bantu peoples, a project by author and director S’busiso Shozi, composer Nhlanhla Mahlangu, and their talented team of performers, dancers and musicians. They illuminate their journey with satirical wit and great poetry, while also highlighting their connection to the universal stories of displacement and expulsion that still happen so often today.
African Exodus was first performed in May 2018 at the Centre for the Less Good Idea and further reworked for Schall&Rausch.

In English, Swahili, Zulu and other languages from Central and West Africa.