When thunder roars, go indoors

As part of both My Body My Space Festival in Mpumalanga, South Africa in March 2025 and Bushfire Schools Festival in eSwatini in May 2025, Huge Sillytoe offered versions of lightning safety through theatre games workshops that they developed in collaboration with scientists from Johannesburg Lightning Research Laboratory during their post as artist-in-lab with Wits School of Arts.

To begin each session, groups of young people were guided through games where they transformed into the frozen water droplets at the centre of a storm-cloud, colliding to generate the necessary charges for a lighting strike. Following this, they further transformed into mountains, trees, electricty pylons, bus shelters, cars, bicycles, and fishing boats, amongst other things, to see who would remain most safe and who would be in most danger from being struck by the lightning generated before. A little more on this process and its aims to mobilize community theatre to raise awareness of the best ways to stay safe in a storm across areas of southern Africa with the highest rates of lightning strike fatalities can be seen in the mini-documentary below.

Video: Brett Eloff. Photos: Kelly John.