Girls of the Golden West

Girls of the Golden West, created by Thami Tshabalala through the prestigious Barney Simon Residency at the start of 2026, is presented as part of the Market Theatre's inaugural Queer Festival.

The work treats the body as a living archive, carrying inherited memory, silence, interruption, gesture and excess where official histories have failed to speak. Drawing on underground modes of survival such as kinship, ritual and embodied storytelling, it foregrounds Black queer presence as both vulnerable and defiant.

Through an act of self-revelation and resistance, the performance reclaims the Black queer body as a political and creative force, asserting visibility and agency on its own te