Xolela Sixaba is kneeling on the floor, a pistol to his head. A white policeman towers over the black South African. Sixaba winces and closes his eyes. Then he breathes deep, opens his mouth, and starts to sing.
We're in a community hall in Woodstock, a suburb of Cape Town, and South Africa's only opera company is rehearsing a new production of Porgy and Bess. The director, Christine Crouse, asks Sixaba, playing Porgy, to imagine how he would feel if he was
being threatened with a gun. "Scared," he says quietly. "It's a gun." Everyone laughs, perhaps nervously.
Later Sixaba tells me he has been threatened at gunpoint many times. The company runs through Porgy and Bess's funeral scene again and this time he looks genuinely terrified when the gun is pressed against his temple. Listening to him and the other singers in Cape Town Opera, formed five years after democracy was won in 1994, you soon realise what's unique about them. When they sing Porgy and Bess they're not really acting at all.
"Real life," says Sixaba afterwards when I ask him what was going through his head during the scene. This softly-spoken baritone looks older than his 39 years, his belly protruding and his head balding. Sixaba has been singing since he was ten and, like almost all the black company members, started out in township church choirs. He never thought he could be an opera singer. None of the black singers I meet in Cape Town knew opera existed until they were asked to audition for the company. Opera has been performed in South Africa since the 1800s but for black people under apartheid it was yet another no-go area.
"In real life, yes, we were scared of white people. And still…" he pauses. "That scene makes me angry. My facial expression is real because you're thinking about what happened in the 70s. They kicked you like anything, beat you like anything. In 1976 I was six years old. The white people wanted us to go to school and learn Afrikaans but we wanted to learn English. You know what happened? They came in cars and if they caught you, they beat you. Now at night when I go home it's not safe. Four guys came out of the bushes the other night and held a 9mm to my head. Luckily a car came and they ran away."
Ntobeko Rwanqa nods slowly as Sixaba speaks. He is also playing Porgy, doubling up in Gershwin's landmark American folk opera for Cape Town Opera's first tour to the UK. Rwanqa is from Gugulethu, a vast township formed in the 1960s when Cape Town's oldest one, Langa, then the only black area, became overcrowded. He now lives in another township, Khayelitsha, and despite the violence, he has no intention of leaving.
"What is happening there on stage is what really happened in South Africa," says 31-year-old Rwanqa, who is also an actor and director, and jokes that the only talent God didn't give him was dancing. "In the 80s I was old enough to be aware of things. They would come to our funerals, open the box, throw the body on the ground. If they wanted to, they would mess up everything." Who would? "The police," he replies. "They had too much power and you couldn't do anything."
Once Rwanqa starts talking, he doesn't stop. His father, a reverend in Gugulethu, had drugs planted on him by the police and was beaten. He can't count the number of times he has had guns pointed at him. He was stabbed in 1996 and 2001, and lifts his shirt to show me the stitches criss-crossing the muscles on his upper back. "Life is still difficult and South Africa has a long way to go," he shrugs. "The poverty is creating lots of crime. If you have nice clothes and a car, the person who doesn't wants to take it from you."
While I'm in Cape Town a newspaper reports that South Africa has officially taken over from Brazil as the world's most unequal country. Opera has a unique role here: if you're good enough, you can sing your way out of poverty. "I'm privileged to be here," Rwanqa says. "We can open doors now that we couldn't before."
Back in rehearsal the company, mostly black South African singers who have travelled far and wide from the townships are warming up. Dressed in jeans and trainers, sunglasses on their heads, they chuck their bags on the floor, turn off their mobile phones, and join in singing scales. Within minutes a great swell of sound fills the room. It's overwhelming, almost too much for this draughty hall, and I'm reminded of something Rwanqa said: "The emotion that comes from the chorus is because everyone is living it. It's more than just singing."
For this production, Gershwin's original setting of Porgy and Bess in 1930s South Carolina has been updated to the Soweto townships of the 1960s, when the serious challenges to apartheid began. It's a brilliant idea. Gershwin originally wrote the opera as a statement about racism on Broadway, and more explicitly to give African American singers the roles they weren't being offered. Poverty, unemployment, drugs, crime, lack of opportunity, all the original themes of Porgy and Bess, strike as much of a chord for the South Africans here today as they did for African Americans in the US in the 1930s.
At Artscape in the city centre, where Cape Town Opera is based, I meet the company's CEO. Michael Williams, an ebullient white South African, is trying to get more people from the townships singing and listening to opera. It's an uphill struggle. Currently, only a fraction (around 10 per cent) of Cape Town Opera's audiences are non-white, and the company receives little support from the ANC government. In South Africa opera is still seen by some as Eurocentric, as less valid than the local cultures that were hidden, neglected and stamped out under apartheid. This is understandable, but for Williams, who sees how much people in the townships love singing and have grown up in choirs, it's frustrating.
"The withdrawal of our funding in the 90s was a political decision," he says. "It was this idea that opera had no place in Africa." The company now takes opera into the townships, brings people from there to Artscape in taxis, and trains singers at the university. Williams has also partnered Scottish Opera to launch a version of Five:15, the scheme that commissions five composers and librettists to make mini-operas. The idea is that Scotland will swap one with South Africa in 2010, the same year that the country hosts the football World Cup. Cape Town is changing fast, the skyline studded with cranes and dominated by the hulking Green Point football stadium under construction close to the Waterfront. At Cape Town Opera, though, some feel change isn't coming fast enough. "We still have a lot of work to do," says director Crouse. "Our audiences are not as mixed as they should be and not as representative of what we have on stage. It's a great pity."
Like everything else in Cape Town, attitudes to opera are changing. One company member tells me he has started hearing Andrea Bocelli played in the townships' shebeens. Another, Pretty Yende, has already had a remarkable career at the age of 24. In August she became the first South African to win the prestigious Belvedere competition in Vienna, and went on to win the Montserrat Caballe competition in Barcelona. She has now been accepted to La Scala and leaves for Milan immediately after the UK Porgy and Bess tour. Yende is very much the fresh-faced poster girl of the New South Africa: young, determined, and confident of her success.
"I heard opera for the first time on television on the British Airways advert," she says, referring to the Flower Duet from Delibes' Lakme. "I was 16. I didn't even know it was human voices. But I knew somehow that I wanted to do it." Yende joined her local choir but was chased out because she didn't have a voice. Still she insisted on learning the aria with her school music teacher and six months later was a national champion.
Yende grew up in a small village, her mother is a primary school clerk and her father a taxi driver. She feels it's precisely because she grew up in South Africa that she has been given so many opportunities so young. "Porgy and Bess is a story about racism and our country has gone through that. The scars are still there and racism is still there. But I feel this is a time of possibility. All the things we didn't have then, we have a chance of now. There are black South Africans who are making it."
The following day one of the singers, Lindile Kula, invites us to his home in Gugulethu. This 33-year-old baritone moved there a year ago from a nearby township with his pregnant wife, Miranda, and their three-year-old son. On the way we drive through the seemingly never-ending sprawl of Gugulethu, home to more than a million black people. Some of the houses, like Kula's, are more spruced up than others, and these are the ones long-term renters now own through right-to-buy schemes. All the people I meet in the townships say that even if they could, they wouldn't leave. This is still their home.
Kula and his wife show us into the sitting room where Xhosa religious music blasts from the television. He brings out bottles of beer and biscuits on individual plates. It has taken Kula many years singing at Cape Town Opera to buy this house and he is very proud of it. He isn't even the only opera singer on the street. "The house was badly damaged (when we got it] and there wasn't even electricity." He looks around at his freshly painted kitchen. "It looks OK. I'm taking baby steps and trying my best to make it nicer."
Kula may not be chalking up international prizes but he is one of the company's success stories, perhaps an even more important one. He has always loved singing and now he makes a living from it. He laughs and says his home in Gugulethu is like his own Constantia, referring to one of Cape Town's most affluent suburbs. "We moved here thanks to the company," Kula says. "If it wasn't for touring and singing with Cape Town Opera I wouldn't have made it."
Porgy and Bess is at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, 30-31 October, 7:30pm; Saturday matinee, 2pm. Tickets from £17, tel: 0131-529 6000, www.eft.co.uk
This article was first published in The Scotsman on 24 October 2009