22 November 2018

Cape Town Carnival announces theme for 2019: VUKA UKHANYE/ Arise and Shine!

Submitted by: Natascha

Cape Town, 20 November 2018 – “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the beautiful ones. It’s time to wake up, raak wys, awaken and be the light!” This is the passionate message of Cape Town Carnival 2019 “VUKA UKHANYE: Arise and Shine!” It is time to shake off limiting habits and ideas, unlock our power and potential, and be all we can be. It’s a jolt of energy and a celebration of human potential, an uplifting call to create and own our future.

Cape Town Carnival takes places on 16 March 2019. This annual platform for artistic and cultural expression is now approaching its tenth year, with increasing boldness and confidence in the messages it conveys.

Collaborative brainstorming sessions between participating community members, organisers and artists from more than 50 neighbourhoods’ across Cape Town generate and identify the creative content for the Cape Town Carnival. “We move from darkness and the unconscious, tethered to history, from struggle towards freedom,” says the brainstorm team of Cape Town Carnival 2019. “Carnival group leaders and crew have recognised the challenge and opportunity in this year’s theme and embraced its potential to convey powerful messages to participants and audiences,” says creative director Brad Baard.

Next year’s theme, VUKA UKHANYE: Arise and Shine!, has stimulated an array of responses and ideas that will find their way into the annual spectacular through dance, costume, performance and illuminated sculptural floats, from “Facing your Fears” to “Cellphone Zombies”, social activism, becoming freedom fighters in our communities and escaping the “Mad Machine”.

“Vuka Ukhanye is a call for critical engagement, a call to step up, using the creative space of carnival arts and the carnivalesque to generate thought, response and action through spectacle and play,” says consultative curator Khanyisile Mbongwa.

Dance group leader Michelle Davids observes, “This is completely out of the box for me, so I am taking the opportunity to express the feeling of freedom.”

Cape Town Carnival CEO Jay Douwes notes, “This theme is a call to reawaken, as individuals and as a collective, to our shared and personal responsibility, to our own power and potential: if not you, then who must do it for you?”

The sponsors of the 2019 Cape Town Carnival are Multichoice, the City of Cape Town, the National Department of Arts and Culture, the National Lotteries Commission, Kfm, the Western Cape Government, Tsogo Sun, Media24, the Western Cape Investment and Trade and Promotion Agency (Wesgro), Business and Arts South Africa (BASA), Peninsula Beverages, and Gearhouse.