A sea of shacks, corrugated iron roofs held in place by tyres and stones, sprawls across the screen. Through the mist in the distance the majesty of Cape Town's iconic Table Mountain and Devils Peak emerge. Dark blue linen is blowing in the wind to dry, a single piece of plastic lies discarded among dry grass by the side of the road (fig.1).

This is the township of Khayelitsha, as portrayed in the establishing scenes of Unogumbe (2013) and Breathe – Umphefumlo (2015), two filmic adaptations by the South African theatre company Isango Ensemble of ‘Western classics’ of music theatre, namely Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde (1957) and Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème (1896). The films are instances of what James Davies and Lindiwe Dovey have described as transculturation in reference to the same ensemble's internationally acclaimed film U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (2005), which is not only the first film opera shot in southern Africa but also ‘one of the most successful post-apartheid South African films’ (Davies & Dovey 2010: 40, 42). While George Bizet's music was not changed in U-Carmen, all libretti of the three film operas have been translated into indigenous South African languages. Referring to Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation (2006), we argue in this chapter that the short film Unogumbe (2013) and full-length feature Umphefumlo (2015) are not only transcultural, but ‘indigenized’ adaptations. Our argument is based on the comprehensive degree to which the material from Puccini and Britten was transformed through various techniques, including re-arrangement of the orchestration, restructuring through cuts, additional elements and aesthetic changes.

In the context of the themes explored in this volume, these films show South African music theatre productions as engaged not only in aesthetic transformation, but also in transformation located in genre and medium. This happens through the engagement of existing South African practices and discourses on stage, resulting in what is often described as ‘Africanization’, ‘indigenization’ or ‘black empowerment’ (Roos 2010; Davies & Davies 2012: 64; Muller 2018; André 2018).