ABOUT DARA BETH

Artist's Bio

Dara Beth is first and foremost an angry, Jewish feminist. Secondly, they are a dedicated arts practitioner. In 2016, Dara completed UCT’s Theatre and Performance programme, for which they received the class medal for theatre-making, the Ruth Peffer’s Prize and distinctions in Drama.

Dara has written and staged multiple original works for various festivals and theatres, which have been nominated for Fleur du Cap, BroadwayWorld, and Kanna awards. When not producing their own work, Dara often works as a facilitator and director. In 2018, Dara was assistant director on The Taming of the Shrew (dir. Tara Notcutt), and directed Kate Pinchuck in Standard Bank Ovation Award-winning Medusa Incarnate.

In 2019, Dara produced a new project, The Chronicles of Athena, Babes. After a successful theatrical run at the Alexander Bar in 2019, Dara was awarded a PESP grant by the National Arts Council in 2021 with which they are currently adapting The Chronicles of Athena, Babes for television.

During 2020, Dara produced several short online film projects: The Womxn’s Day Comedy Special – an hour-long production featuring some of South Africa’s best women comedians; Send It – a raw short film exploring love, desire and confessions (which recently aired as part of Woordfees TV on DStv); and Scenes on Screens | Season One and Scenes on Screens | Season Two – curated productions comprising several short film-based projects created by artists across South Africa.

In 2021, Dara’s newest work, all my ex-lovers are dead, was staged as part of the Artscape’s New Voices Programme 2021. In 2022, Dara was shortlisted for the AWPN-Warwick Artist-In-Residence, selected for the Upper Jay Arts Centre CA+MP Artist-In-Residence programme, and chosen to participate in STAND Foundation’s Pen To Paper programme. At the start of 2023–as part of the Pen To Paper programme–all my ex-lovers are dead was awarded a fully-funded run at Woordfees in Stellenbosch, South Africa.

When not producing their own work, Dara works as a mentor and director, facilitating others’ theatre journeys. Most recently, Dara was awarded a grant from South Africa’s National Arts Council to develop a network for and digital archive of works by young women and nonbinary playwrights in South Africa.

Artist's Statement

As a theatre-maker, I seek to enact the worlds which I dream of. I believe we have a responsibility to tell stories which offer a better future, by interrogating and reimagining the canon that has informed our past. My work uses mythology and literary allusions as a framework upon which to tell everyday contemporary stories that explore sex, sexuality, gender, identity, and intimacy. The thing that separates theatre from other forms of performance is its intimacy and sense of immediacy, its ability to take a moment and turn it into a world. And its ability to take us out of the world and key us into a single moment.

My function is to offer people these worlds and moments through which to extend their view of our world. Through tales that are raunchy, witty, tongue-in-cheek, high-energy, bubblegum pop, biting, quirky, honest, unflinching, and occasionally self-indulgent and overly romantic, I aim to evoke a sense of joy, inspire connections, and instigate a pleasurable form of introspection

Headshot by Canned Rice Productions | Photo of Panicked Director and Stressed Actor by Maggie Gericke