An operetta about coming to terms with faith and destiny, through the metaphor of flight, makes its Johannesburg debut on Friday July 6 at the Dance Factory in Newtown.

‘The Flower of Shembe’, by Cape Town based composer-librettist Neo Muyanga, coincides with ‘Sounding Out’, a July group exhibition at the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios that broadly concerns the intersection of visual art and contemporary music.

Muyanga says: “It is true that we live in cynical times; times in which factionalism and war mongering prevail indiscriminately both in the secular and the spiritual worlds. Perhaps the act of making a work about hope and the possibility of transcendence feels a little anachronistic but I believe it is also necessary in order to power the collective imagination of now.”

Muyanga, who is also part of acclaimed acoustic duo Blk Sonshine and co-founder of Pan-African Space Station, an online archive of sound and art, is a participating artist on ‘Sounding Out’. He exhibits characterisation sketches created in preparation for ‘The Flower of Shembe’.

Muyanga is joined at the Bag Factory gallery by artists including Sanell Aggenbach, Brendon Bussy, Lynette Bester, Gordon Froud, Jared Ginsburg, Josh Ginsburg, Nathan Jansen van Vuuren, Angie Mullins and João Orecchia.

The exhibition also extends beyond the gallery walls through a collaboration with Invisible Cities Pirate Radio (ICR). For its two-week duration, ICR will broadcast from the Bag Factory on 102.2FM a series of sound artworks. Bussy and Orecchia are joined by Malose Malahlela, Jane Rademeyer, James Sey and James Webb in this radio art experiment.