Alexandra High School art teacher Lihle Nene believes that charting a way forward often means looking backwards first.

That philosophy underpins the 6th Annual Sibandla Theatre Festival, which returns to the school on August 29, bringing together drama, music, dance and visual art to reconnect young people with South Africa’s history.

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Now in its sixth year, the festival builds on a legacy of exposing learners to diverse artistic forms while prompting reflection on both the triumphs and traumas that have shaped the nation.

Sibandla, Nene explained, is drawn from the Nguni word ‘ibandla,’ meaning a group united by common purpose. Sibandla is a fitting name for a festival that merges physical theatre, conventional dialogue-driven drama, music and visual art into a single platform.

He said this year’s theme, Echoes of Distortion, invites learners to examine the fragmented pieces of the past and how they continue to shape present-day identity and behaviour.

“We are talking about the broken pieces of the past. They are telling stories of what transpired in the past, and they are also trying to examine how that is affecting us today.”

He explained how the theme’s title carries weight. “Echoes obviously speaks to the recurring sound, the sound from the past, the voices of people who passed on during apartheid or before apartheid.”

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The performances will also grapple with land dispossession and the distortion of indigenous identity under colonial rule, a period he described as strategically engineered to reshape society.

Nene hopes the festival pushes learners to sit with uncomfortable questions such as where their communities came from, and where past generations went right or wrong.

“There are positive things to learn from the past, and there are also negative things that we have to examine: how do we fix now, how do we shape ourselves moving forward?” he said.

He said that a grounding in local history must come before learners engage with global historical events. Young people, he fears, are increasingly disconnected from the figures and events that built the society they live in today. This is a gap he hopes the festival can begin to close.

Parents have also been invited to attend, and the hope, for Nene, is that the conversations sparked on stage will continue at home.

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