Pauline Malefane is the pride of her township since playing a tracksuit- wearing Carmen in a new film version of the opera, writes Arminta Wallace
We all know the scene in Georges Bizet's Carmen when the eponymous heroine makes her entrance. Don't we? All together, now: "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle." Come on, you can't say you don't know the tune. Then there's the obligatory slinky costume (thankfully most opera directors have given up on the flouncy red flamenco look), designed to allow - if not encourage - a good deal of shimmying and hip-wiggling.
Those who are disposed to calculate such things reckon that Carmen is the world's most frequently performed opera - which means that the whole package has become so hackneyed it's hard to imagine it done in such a way as to make you actually sit up and take notice. That's until you see Dimpho Di Kopane's film U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha, in which a thoughtful Carmen, played by Pauline Malefane, makes herself a cup of coffee, sits at the kitchen table and - as she sings - wonders what love is about, really. Despite her being dressed in a tracksuit, the effect is electric.
The shimmying comes later: and trust me, this woman can shimmy. Shot in the South African language of Xhosa with English subtitles, the film is set in the township of Khayelitsha, 20km from Cape Town.
The contemporary setting gives the characters new resonance, and Bizet's well-worn score is also given new legs by being placed against the vibrant backdrop of township life, which includes a generous helping of traditional Xhosa music. The film also captures an aspect of life in Khayelitsha rarely commented on by outsiders, and which is particularly appropriate in the context of the opera's exploration of various aspects of femininity: the strong sense of sisterhood among township women.
Is it, I ask Malefane, who grew up in the township, an accurate portrayal of life in her home town? "Yes," she begins. "It's a very. . . " She stops and thinks for a second, looking uncannily like her coffee-drinking on-screen alter ego. Then she nods. "It has a very, very strong community relationship, especially for the women, if I can put it like that," she says.
"I think it's because in the early years - I'm talking about the days of our grandfathers and grandmothers - the men would leave the rural areas, which is where most of us come from, to move to Cape Town and other big cities. And they would leave the wives behind taking care of the kids. So the women stuck together, looking after the farms and that kind of thing. I think that's where it originated from; the husbands were away working, so the women had to come together and form some kind of strong bond to hold it all together."
Since it was shot in 2004, U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha has been winning the hearts and minds of audiences and film festival juries, most notably when it took the Golden Bear award at Berlin last year. It went down a storm too at The Dublin International Film Festival earlier this year.
Back home in Khayelitsha, though, the reception verged on ecstatic. When the film was given its South African premiere in the township last March - in the same building in which the final scenes were shot - 1,500 people turned up every day for a month, and extra screenings had to be added.
"People were so, so happy, and so excited," she says. "They felt part of it, somehow. In the movie you can see lots of people from the township, and of course the audience can identify various things: 'Oh, I know that area - I know that place.' And I think they were proud of the success of the film because it didn't only put the cast into the international spotlight - it put South Africa on the map as well."
Though she sang in local choirs from an early age, Malefane's first exposure to opera came with a school trip to a performance of Don Giovanni. As she recalls, she wasn't impressed. "I found it very strange, to be honest with you," she says. "I thought, 'My goodness - why are these people singing, instead of just talking to each other?' And then these women who just sing at the top of their lungs; it is so noisy. They are so full of noise. You know how schoolchildren are. We went out into the foyer and imitated what we had heard." She emits an impressively strangled squawk. "Then we totally forgot about opera."
After leaving school, she signed up for a course in municipal administration. "What a waste of 12 months," she says. "I was a member of the choir in my school - but in those days no one thought you could make a career out of singing. And anyway, your parents would go mad if you said you wanted to be a singer. You either wanted to be a teacher or a doctor or an engineer. Nobody had ever done municipal administration, because it was a new course, so I said, 'Okay, I'll try that'." She shakes her head in mock despair. "My husband always says I'd make a terrible administrator, let alone a municipal one. The whole year was just miserable for me."
Having decided to take a year out to think about her future, she spotted an ad for the Cape Town Opera and thought a position in the chorus might pay a few bills for a while. "I got in touch with the director of the opera house, who was also the director of the university opera school, and I said I'd like to try and study opera. And he sat me down and he said, 'It's gonna be difficult. You don't have any musical background or training'."
He suggested a compromise: she would start by singing in the opera house, then register for a course in opera studies the next year. "I said, 'No - I want to do it now'. He said, 'Okay, fine'. I don't know what I was thinking. When I actually began the workshops I thought, 'Oh my God - what have I got myself into?' But after watching the fourth year students performing extracts, and sometimes whole operas, it sort of grew on me."
It looks as if - in her courage and determination, at least - Malefane has a streak of Carmen in her. Are there any aspects of the famously feisty heroine she finds, let's say, unsavoury? "I wouldn't say there are things that I don't like about her, because I try to understand her situation," she says. "But if we were in the same situation, I would react differently. I wouldn't do things the way she would." For example? "With men," she says emphatically. "I'm not very hungry in terms of relationships with men. I'm very careful, and I stick to one person.
'I mean, Carmen wanted satisfaction and the only way she could get it was from different people. But I love the fact that she's a very determined, strong woman trying to live in a very male-dominated area. And as much as she's strong and determined, she's also vulnerable. The men try to make something that they want out of her. In the end she fights for her own independence - which is, I think, what's going on with this woman. She's trying to be herself. Right to the last. She could prevent her death, if she wanted to - she could agree to get back together with this man who is obsessed with her. But she doesn't want to live like that."
The Dimpho Di Kopane theatre company was founded in the year 2000 by the director Mark Dornford-May and the conductor Charles Hazelwood, former artistic directors of Broomhill Opera in London, who created the 40-strong troupe following a series of more than 2,000 auditions in both urban and rural South Africa. In its short lifetime it has scored a number of theatrical hits both in London and on Broadway, including Yiimimangaliso: The Mysteries, which was a big favourite at the Dublin Theatre Festival a few years back.
Meanwhile a follow-up movie, Son of Man, has just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in the US. Another pretty well-known story, isn't it? "Let me put it like this," says Malefane. "It's a look at the gospel story in Africa in modern times. So now Jesus lives in Africa - not really South Africa so much as a fantasy Africa which we've created. And we see a lot more of Mary in our story than in the Bible, where the angel comes to her and says, 'You'regoing to have a baby' - and that's it."
Meanwhile, having worked on the translation of the Carmen libretto into Xhosa, it seems Malefane has also been hard at work on the set of Son of Man - doing the catering. Well, she says with a shrug and a smile, why not? "I enjoy cooking," she says. "And I know what I need to eat when I'm working - better than somebody who's just cooking to fill the hungry stomachs of 200 people. Sometimes you just need a big curry with lots of rice, you know? Something tasty, not something with lots and lots of water to make it go around.
"Three days ago I was in charge of the company kitchen. We had 250 teachers coming to see extracts from the stage productions, because they want to bring children to see them - and I had made a cucumber and pineapple, carrot and lettuce salad marinated with orange juice. And I'm telling you, we had six bowls of salad - and within the first 100 people the salads were gone. At the moment we have power cuts in South Africa, especially in the Western Cape, and of course the power went off just as we walked on stage. We ended up performing for the teachers in candlelight - which was beautiful, anyway. But by the time we were eating the electricity wasn't back. So when the salads ran out, I couldn't see what was in the fridge. I just pulled something out, and something more, peppers, mushrooms, anything - 'Okay, this is eatable'."
She claps her hands and laughs. "In two minutes it was gone and they needed another one. Sometimes people bring their plates back with food on, when they don't like it - you know? Not this time." Audiences have been reacting to U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha in much the same way.
U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha opens on Friday