Staging gendered trauma and memory through ecological motifs in Siphokazi Jonas’s Around the Fire

The study examines how Siphokazi Jonas’s choreopoetic performance, Around the Fire, employs ecological elemental motifs as metaphoric and performative structures through which gendered trauma, memory, and survival are articulated. The performance incorporates ecological elements, including fire, rain, moonlight, geological instability, and breath, as affective languages that translate women's lived experiences of violence, displacement, care, and loss into collective, embodied, and sensorial forms. African Womanism and Ecocriticism support this study by establishing an eco-feminist performance aesthetic grounded in communal endurance, maternal memory, and relational survival rather than individual autonomy. The performance analysis with a minimal dramaturgical approach and close reading of the dialogues of the play Around the Fire demonstrates how fire functions as a symbol of protest and transformation, rain as a representation of social neglect and emotional saturation, the moon as an ambivalent maternal witness, the earth as a repository of buried trauma, and breath as the fragile threshold between survival and collapse. These elements operate as sites of ecological memory, allowing personal suffering to become collectively visible. Women’s bodies are centred as the medium through which ecological metaphors are identified and addressed. The performance Around the Fire reframes nature not as a backdrop, but as a responsive register of the gendered experiences of women in trauma and the recollection of memory within contemporary South African performance.