Nomakhwezi Becker

I took my first steps on a stage and have found home ever since.

I’m a South African–German interdisciplinary artist and facilitator working across theatre, poetry, and storytelling. My work has been platformed at the Barbican Centre, Southbank Centre, Westminster Abbey, Translationale Berlin, Poetry Africa, and the National Arts Festival (Ovation Award, 2019). I have been a member of Projekt Europa: Projekt Empower cohort 2025, Barbican Young Poets (’24 & ’25), Camden People’s Theatre Starting Blocks 2025, and High Rise New Gens 2024.

Rooted in the Southern African oral tradition of Call and Response, my practice explores how performance can foster dialogue, intimacy, and community across borders of language, culture, and geography. I create in English shaped by Zulu, Xhosa, and German, drawing on inheritance and “in-betweenity” as a generative space for exploring identity, belonging, and memory. My performances often combine poetic text, live storytelling, and embodied action, treating the body as an archive of story at the intersections between personal and cultural histories.

Current projects include “Holding Ground”, a performance work rooted in family archives and homemaking practices drawn from maternal lineages, integrating Blaudruck and beadwork research as acts of remembrance and making home.  “To Live on the Tongue” is an interdisciplinary poetic collection in development, building upon this research of oral and material heritage as language and form. I also lead Call & Response Workshops creative writing and performance workshops, participatory spaces for creative exchange and discovery of embodied and inherited wisdom.