About the Artist
Tanika Paschke-Moloi is a singer-songwriter and storyteller whose roots in journalism continue to shape her music. Years spent listening to other people’s stories now find expression in songs that explore love, loss, resilience and belonging, reflecting the ways we change as individuals and as a society.
Blending indie folk and soul, she brings songs and gripping storytelling together in Persephone’s Myth, a contemporary retelling of a Greek myth set in a South African mining town. Through moments of tenderness and humour, her performances draw you into a world that feels intimately familiar—a story you haven’t lived, yet somehow recognise as your own.
Listen to the Music
Persephone’s Myth is a 12-track hybrid musical theatre project that reimagines a classic Greek myth through song and story, set against the cultural landscape of post-apartheid South Africa.
Persephone grows up in a dusty mining town just outside Johannesburg, raised by a single father whose love of Greek mythology inspires her name. Her unusual name and inherited love of books alienate her from her peers. Her father, who dreamed of becoming a painter but became a miner instead, suddenly falls ill and dies.
She buries her grief, grows up and becomes a journalist. She thinks she’s doing just fine, coasting through life—until an assignment takes her back to her hometown to investigate a mysterious illness spreading through the community.
To uncover the truth, Persephone must descend into both the mine’s literal underworld and her own unconscious, confronting what has been lurking there all along.
Watch the Music Video
Step into Persephone’s world, where paradox, contradiction and nuance meet heart and reason. Through song and story, discover a deeper understanding of the human experience we all share. This self-filmed performance of the title song offers a first glimpse into Persephone’s Myth—a world taking shape through music, storytelling and the creation of a show.
Building her visual world is part of telling her story. The landscapes she moves through, the objects she carries, the light and shadow around her all offer ways to express what words alone might leave unsaid. As this recording grows into a music video, these elements will bring the worlds above and below ground into conversation: a meeting of Greek mythology and a South African mining town, of everyday life and the imagined.
Creating Persephone as a character means getting to know her from the inside out. What does she believe? What has she inherited, and what will she question? How do love, grief and curiosity shape the person she becomes? Through writing her scenes and songs, I am exploring her contradictions: the distance between what she feels and what she says, what she longs for and what she fears, and the choices she makes as she begins to understand her own story.
Creating the show brings these threads together. Songs, soliloquies, visual imagery and live performance become ways of discovering both Persephone and the world that has shaped her. Each performance offers an opportunity to listen, experiment and develop the work further. This is an invitation to follow that process as Persephone’s Myth grows—from a song filmed at home into a music video and a living theatrical world.
Come to a Show
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Come to a Show ~
Audience & Media Reviews
“[Audience review about how the music and storytelling made them feel.]”
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“[Audience review about how the music and storytelling made them feel.]”
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“[Audience review about how the music and storytelling made them feel.]”
— Audience member · Placeholder