A solo movement-based theatre work that reclaims the broom not simply as an object of domestic labour but as a portal to the power, memory and spiritual intelligence of African women.

The work takes us on a journey to the deep landscape of maternal lineage, tracing how ancestral knowledge moves quietly across generations. It is an intimate tracking of memory carried through the simple architecture of everyday life.
Through indigenous dance vocabularies, contemporary movement, text, and song, she enters a world where sweeping becomes ritual, repetition becomes rhythm, and the everyday becomes a pathway to ancestral knowledge. The broom becomes her companion, witness, and memory-keeper connecting her directly to the women who came before her. At the heart of PHAHLANA is a fierce refusal to accept how women’s labour, care, and embodied knowledge have been diminished into servitude or erased.

The work completely rejects the standard framing of black womanhood as a monument to suffering. Instead it commands the stage to unveil the absolute authority, creativity, softness, devotion and continuity held within the quiet gestures of African women. By positioning the broom as the central, PHAHLANA invites audiences into a deeply human encounter with an unspoken cultural archive and the ongoing celebration of women’s embodied knowledge as central, sacred and significant.