About Mkhululi Mabija and Paul Castles
South Africa and New York
Mkhululi Mabija (CBA ’19) is a lyricist, librettist, and writer from South Africa. His major works include Tsotsi and Bessie the Blue-Eyed Xhosa (Cape Town Opera), Bhekizizwe (Opera’r Ddraig, BBC), Goddess (Berkeley Rep), Mongezi (Market Theatre), and numerous dance musicals for Amandla Danca Teatro. Current projects include Soweto Uprising Oratorio (commissioned by Jo’burg Theatre) and an African reimagination of Verdi’s Aida. He has been selected by the Mail and Guardian Newspaper as one of South Africaʼs Top 200 Young South Africans (2015, 2021), a GQ Magazine 20 Game Changers (2016), an ImpACT Award for Theatre (2016), and a Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award (2018).
Paul Castles (CBA ’18) is an Australian/American composer whose music reconjures how stories are told through live, experiential, and digital performance. His work include Repast (Wldr, Light Adelaide 2023), The Percipients (7 Daughters of Eve 2020-ongoing) with Sibyl Kempson, Wild Goose Dreams (Public Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Theatre Royal Bath) with Hansol Jung, The Fountain (winner of Best New Musical at DIMF 2012) and Julie (Gamagol Theatre, Guerilla Theatre, International Festival for the Centenary of Strindberg) with Chae-kyung Lee, and Touching Loss (Clare Cook Dance Theatre 2015, Acadian Centre for the Arts and Basin Dance Collective 2016). He was the artist-in-residence at UKARIA Cultural Centre in 2021-22 and has been a fellow with the Sundance Institute and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.
The Road Between the Desert and the Ocean
The Road Between the Desert and the Ocean is an original ballet-opera with a libretto by Mkhululi Mabija and music by Paul Castles. It tells the story of Samo and Gamo, two elders lost in the deserts of the Kalahari Desert (present-day Namibia). Mabija and Castles will explore the use of ballet as the primary mode of narrative expression within a music theater piece and the dramatic storytelling possibilities of replacing text and staged action with movement and dance.
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