At the Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative, Tshego Khutsoane is helping rural youth turn art and performance into possibility and healing.
Emakhazeni, South Africa (26 November 2025) – Namatshego “Tshego” Khutsoa joined the Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative (FATC) in 2019 to give youth an opportunity to explore dance, theatre and the art of healing through movement. In 2015, FATC moved to rural Mpumalanga to create a space of opportunity for youth. The ten years that have followed have had a significant impact on the youth enrolled in the programmes. Most importantly, the move gave rural youth the chance to dream.
Tshego is a multidisciplinary creative practitioner whose work moves fluidly between performance, social engagement, and healing. As a trained intimacy coordinator at the SAG-AFTRA-accredited training body called Safe Sets, they are widely respected for cultivating safe, conscious performance environments that honour both vulnerability and artistry. Beyond their individual work, Tshego serves as Development Manager at FATC.
The organisation has spent more than three decades using the arts as a force for social justice, dialogue, and community transformation. FATC’s legacy, from its pioneering HIV and AIDS awareness work in the 1990s to its acclaimed MY BODY MY SPACE: Public Arts Festival, continues to shape how art is experienced, shared, and lived across South Africa. During the pandemic, FATC introduced food gardens that fed over 90 of the participants’ families, and since then, families have learned to grow their own food. It’s Arts and Agriculture, and the blend seems to work beautifully.
We had the opportunity to speak to the inspiring Tshego, who not only had a way with words but also left us feeling deeply inspired and excited to share this story.
Discussing the arts, we learned how Tshego discovered its ability to hold healing, social engagement and performance all in one powerful package. For Tshego, the journey started early, while in church. Raised in both the “Charismatic Christian” or, as the trope goes, the “happy-clappy” folk and within the more traditional Lutheran church, Tshego got a tap into how one can worship differently, using one’s body in the spontaneity of praise and worship alongside steadying, grounded faith, creating a beautiful balance and foundation.
“The performance in the church space is kind of how I came to connect the dots, the church is how I came to understand and appreciate how performance, social engagement and healing intersect.”
“Community, bringing people together, bringing people into the performance of something they hold dear, brings healing”
That love of performance evolved into a passion to support people, creating safe spaces for expression and working directly with the community. Joining FATC, where there is a deep legacy in community-driven art, Tshego has seen how this kind of organisation can shape lives in rural spaces.
Moving theatre and performative arts into the rural space ten years ago, from Johannesburg to Emakhazeni, Mpumalanga, began bridging the gap between schooling and the space where tertiary education should be. TVET colleges and tertiary education are typically not available in rural South Africa. For many of the youths at FATC, the organisation has given them purpose. Most have only completed grade 10 and are now working towards credits to matriculate.
In rural South Africa, there is scarcity and a lack of access to opportunity. It was in this space that FATC began to make an incredible difference.
“[The arts] create opportunities for young people to have futures that they wouldn’t otherwise have because they have not finished secondary school. To offer credits, to bridge them into spaces where they can get a job, or a door to further studies or even to grow their communities from a new perspective of potential that is available to them.”
“The arts are about celebration and expression, and just being exposed to that can have such a significance”
The acclaimed MY BODY MY SPACE: Public Arts Festival is just one of the ways FATC’s youth tap into opportunity. Working with the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS) on Third Space (In)Visible for the National Arts Festival in Makhanda was another. Promise Mosoma and Promise Magopa, two alumni from the FATC programmes, were selected through a rigorous audition process led by choreographer Janeth to join the (In)Visible dance.
Supported by IFAS and the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, the dance development project connected choreographers and scenographers from South Africa, Uganda, Mozambique, and Tanzania with dancers from community art centres across the Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga, and Western Cape. The dance ‘(In)Visible’ was choreographed by Janeth Mulapha, who draws on her work with people experiencing sudden blindness in Mozambique. Jenni Lee Crewe, a South African scenographer, joined the project, offering her expertise to the FATC performers as well.
The beauty of the collaboration was that the performance wasn’t just about literal sight loss, but also in the dialogues of what people choose to see or not to see. Performers experienced sudden blindness through the use of blindfolds. The piece explored themes of neglect, resilience, and belonging; audiences were invited to reflect on human fragility and shared humanity.
Photo Credit: Christo Doherty.
Photo Credit: Christo Doherty.
Photo Credit: Christo Doherty.
Photo Credit: Christo Doherty.
It is collaborations like this that give the arts so much to hope for. It’s creativity in the face of challenges, movement in spite of fear and finding a footing in a world that can sometimes feel hard to understand.
For Tshego, collaboration goes beyond the theatre space. They hold an MBA from Henley Business School and a Master’s degree in Dramatic Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University). This time, it’s Arts and Business that blend together. As to why these two qualifications work, Tshego has insights:
“At a basic level, corporate spaces need more creative solutions to performance and the people dynamics of their structures. On the counter, artists and art spaces, like the NGO space that I am in, specifically these good core spaces, or social entrepreneurs, need more business smarts and access to developing business acumen.
I had big dreams around creating more value for the arts within the business space and the opposite in becoming more literate for myself and others in the business of the arts space”
These skills have been adapted to help the youth programmes. This is where that bridging comes back into the conversation, giving the youth tertiary skills to leap from school-leaver to job-ready or entrepreneurial-focused pursuits.
From business, branding, leadership thinking, community leadership, business planning, and learning to pitch ideas for potential funding, the knowledge learned eases the school-leaver jolt that most young adults face. Practical skills to help take those first big steps make all the difference.
As FATC works to uplift “community builders”, there is a hope for the future. For the youth of Emakhazeni and for the youth of all rural spaces in South Africa.
“I hope to continue to build spaces both artistic and communal, where performance becomes a living language, for us to heal and for us to transform” Tshego, ends.
This interview is part of a special partnership between the Embassy of France in South Africa, Lesotho and Malawi, the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS) and Good Things Guy, celebrating 30 years of cultural co-creation. Since 1995, IFAS, the cultural agency of the Embassy of France in South Africa, Lesotho and Malawi, has supported artistic and creative exchange across disciplines from visual arts to gaming.
To mark its 30th anniversary in 2025, IFAS and Good Things Guy are sharing the stories of South African creatives whose journeys have been shaped by French–South African cooperation, highlighting three decades of connection, creativity, and shared achievement. You can read them all here.
Sources: Supplied
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