The National Arts Festival gets under way on 25 June. With budget and funding cuts making it harder than ever for young artists to pursue their dreams, a Cape Town-based theatre platform is using the power of community to ensure that emerging voices are heard.

She's an actor, playwright, theatre producer, and if the title of her new show is to be believed - she's also (not) a real comedian. She is, however, whether she'd care to admit it or not, an entrepreneur, albeit not of the capitalist variety.

Sophie Joans is a community builder in the theatre world.

This role has, somewhat organically, come to define her, in fact. It happened out of necessity and perhaps because there is a real need within the theatre industry for sleeves-up, in-the-trenches go-getters like her.

Not that Joans is thrilled to be considered part of an "industry".

"I've never been one to be in big musicals," she says. "What I love is indie fringe theatre - a small black box space with artists on a tight budget doing whatever they can with whatever they have to make something special and captivating."

Her frame of reference for this sort of independent (as opposed to comparatively industrial-scale) theatre is the erstwhile Alexander Bar, where she worked until the pandemic shut it down.

"It was a very fringe theatre in central Cape Town that offered artists a much-needed platform - a springboard of sorts for fresh graduates and emerging...