National Arts Festival 2010 Grahamstown

Published in the Mail & Guardian, June 18, 2010

The nation was in raptures after the successful opening of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Sport is not alone in riding high on this optimism. The annual National Arts Festival (NAF) envisioned this global tournament as an opportunity for a bumper year. Giving football fans the benefit of the doubt – that they might have interests in fancy footwork other than dribbling and enjoy more musical pursuits than a cacophony of vuvuzelas – the festival is extending itself from 10 to 15 days, and starting earlier than usual (on June 20).

Commendably, the NAF wants to “showcase” (all four forwards by the principle stakeholders use the same word in the official programme) what South Africa’s artistically rich, financially strapped, multicultural arts have to offer the world, while the world is here.

For their efforts, they quite understandably hoped for some of the R150-million bounty allocated for arts and culture during the FIFA event, and applied for it. After all, as spectacular as the enormous dung beetle puppet rolling the soccer ball was (and it was wonderful) at the FIFA kick-off, the festival does provide a more comprehensive platform for advertising our broader civilized pursuits.

In addition to the unprecedented attention and a large foreign media contingent now scrambling for new angles on life in Africa, it seems various international impresarios, even some theatre critics, were lured to our shores for the first time thanks to the World Cup.

The NAF wanted a once-off R10-million grant; not for commissioning favoured artists, but for marketing the country’s resourceful talent and most importantly to create a lasting legacy project in the arts.

The Minister for Arts and Culture may be attending the opening ceremony, but to date the festival has not received any money from national government for this year. As is so often the case in the department’s grey finances, if a decision was made either way it appears not to have been communicated.

The National Lottery Distribution Fund has responded and are promising support for the next three years. Most of the tab has been picked up by the festival’s established sponsors.

Asked if staging a jumbo festival during the World Cup was their most brilliant or stupidest idea, Tony Lankester (CEO of the festival) replied: “Ask me in two weeks time.”

In the month prior to the festival, theatre producers throughout the country were unsure how to enter these unchartered waters. The NAF in its 36th year chose to grab the bull by the horns or rather the mascot Zakumi by the tail. At least there is no shortage of artists; between the combined main and fringe programmes are over 500 productions.

Logistically, these unchartered waters posed considerable challenges and expense. Equipment, such as marquees, and car hire were at a premium, and it was a battle to get technical crews, who are also asking prohibitive rates. The festival was stung by the airlines. Worried that they would not be able to get seats for their artists, the NAF booked tickets well in advance at then extortionate prices. Fares have now plummeted and there is capacity. The upside is that audiences need not fret about travel arrangements to get to the festival. Accommodation too is available, although the weekend of June 26 is heavily booked according to Lankester. Sales in comparison to previous years are very encouraging, he says.

One thing is sure, without the festival the World Cup largesse would have all but bypassed Grahamstown. The Eastern Cape hasn’t managed to attract any team base camps. The festival is laying on extra day trips and has shored up their marketing in Port Elizabeth, where four matches including a quarter-final are scheduled during the festival period.

Football does make a turn on the stage. The Football Diaries is an autobiographical “meditation on art and sport”, a solo performance by Ahilan Ratnamohan, a young, Sri Lankan-Australian player manqué. Football Football, performed by a cast from Italy, Singapore, Bosnia and Slovenia, explores “the art of football” through dance, theatre, video, music and special effects. The Giant Match is a street theatre production using 32 giant puppets to relate a South African version of Romeo and Juliet. In this allegory, the two young lovers are kept apart by a feud between their two families, culminating in a comic football match and a wedding.

Matches will of course be screened in Grahamstown; combing audiences and spectators, will make the festival a very special place to be during the World Cup.

June 18, 2010 | Comments Closed

Exhibit A by Brett Bailey

Click link for the review: Published in the Mail & Guardian June 4

June 12, 2010 | Comments Closed

Photos of Exhibit A: Deutsch-Südwestafrika Installation by Brett Bailey

Trophies from Eden (Anna Louw)


Trophies from Eden (Steven Afrikaner)


A Place in the Sun (Mathilda Joseph)


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Dr Fischer’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Marcelinus Swartbooi, Josef van der Westhuizen, Chris Nekongo, Avril Nuuyoma)


The Age of Enlightenment - Angelo Soliman (Lamin Jammeh)


Ready Mades / Found Objects: 1. Gambian 2. Cameroonian 3. Ghanaian 4. Nigerian.


Survival of the Fittest (Marcus Omofuma Nigerian by Ken Paul Chukwunonye)


Vevangua Muondjo The Hat Maker

May 27, 2010 | Tags: | Comments Closed

Waiting for Godot (Little Theatre)

Photo: Guy de Lancey


Director Peter Hall recalled that when Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot opened in London it was greeted with derision and incomprehension by the critics. The story at least goes that critic Harold Hobson left the auditorium, but was persuaded to go back inside and trust the experience. Hobson then wrote a panegyric, and Beckett mania gripped London. Across the Atlantic, Brooks Atkinson wrote of Godot: ‘Theatregoers can rail at it, but they cannot ignore it. For Mr. Beckett is a valid writer’. The legendary critic Kenneth Tynan, required a few weeks to understand the work, but soon concluded: the play ‘forced me to re-examine the rules which had hitherto governed the drama; and having done so, to pronounce them not elastic enough.’ Beckett of course went on to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Well-known South African author Damon Galgut will direct Beckett’s landmark play with a dream team cast: David Isaacs as Estragon; Oscar Petersen as Vladimir; Martin le Maitre as
Pozzo; Graham Weir as Lucky.

Galgut, who has over the years steeped himself in Beckett’s oeuvre, says that the writer “makes complete sense to me, and the intellectual theorising that goes on around his work often leaves me perplexed”.

According to Galgut, Beckett is “a writer who gave embodiment to his internal psychic landscape, which is why he is so insistent that the nature and texture of his work should not be changed in the staging. It’s a wish I’m happy to respect, because inside those parameters quite a latitude of interpretation is still possible.

As director, Galgut intends to, play up “the broader elements of characterisation – the slapstick, the comic patter between the characters, the timing – as well as the anguish of the aimless waiting. It’s called a tragicomedy, so the two poles should both be present, the despair as well as the humour. Beckett is very funny when he’s played seriously.”

Galgut notes that one of the earliest productions was in a prison in the United States – “the physical aspects of the play – the broken-down bodies, the endless state of waiting – were immediately intelligible to the audience. For obvious reasons, I guess. But the same applies to almost any audience. We’re all waiting for Godot, whether we know it or not.”

May 21, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | Comments Closed

Interview with Athol Fugard published in IATC Journal

Athol Fugard

April 27, 2010 | Tags: | Comments Closed

Tainted Love (At Beefcakes) Sunday nights


Christine Weir and Godfrey Johnson’s Tainted Love is the perfect cabaret show for this tiny, new basement venue on the fringe of Green Point’s alternative ghetto; it feels like an underground club in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.

With songs such as Masochism Tango (Tom Lehrer), Hanky Panky (Stephen Sondheim), Tainted Love (Marc Almond) and Fuck you very much (Lilly Allen), they explore love in its kinkier dimensions, from playful sadomasochism (Have you waxed your crack? by Johnson and Weir) to Sapphic love (I Kissed a Girl by Katie Perry). It’s on the light and funny side, and you’d have to be quite a prude to be offended.

Choreographer Fiona du Plooy, who made an impression in the camp country and western cabaret Angels on Horseback last year, directs. The fingerprints of that show are evident here.

Johnson and Weir make a superb double act. They are top-drawer performers, with Weir’s exceptional vocal talents and Johnson’s (who sings too) musical versatility. On stage, they have natural comic reciprocity, their witty repartee carried with aplomb into the cheeky and sometimes tricky choreography.

One hopes this will be the start of wonderful duo and great things to come.

April 23, 2010 | Tags: , , | Comments Closed

Afrikaaps (Baxter) Until April 23

Photo: Aryan Kaganof


The master narrative would have us believe that Afrikaans is the evolutionary linguistic product of the Dutch settlers. Certainly, the academic understanding of Afrikaans, the official language taught not only in South Africa but abroad, is the codified (some will also argue nationalist) project of the white Afrikaner. In so doing, a wedge was driven between the language and the identity of the majority of its speakers. There were school boycotts in the 1970s against Afrikaans as “the language of the oppressor”. In certain circles, Afrikaans is still believed to be under threat thanks to that stain.

As David Kramer and Taliep Petersen’s musical Ghoema some years ago set out to reclaim a Cape musical heritage largely written out of authorized history during apartheid, Afrikaaps is a new theatrical edutainment fighting for the recognition of how Afrikaans developed as a Dutch creolized language amongst coloured speakers outside of this white hegemony.

The first written Afrikaans was as phonetic Arabic script translations of the Qur’an over 200 years ago. The Bible was only translated into today’s official Afrikaans in 1933.

The extremely talented young cast under the direction of Catherine Henegan seeking to set the record straight are hip-hop poet Jitsvinger, singer, actor and dancer Moenier Adams, singer and poet Blaq Pearl, hip-hop artist and activist Emile Jansen, rapper and break-dancer Bliksemstraal, accompanied by composer, pianist and jazz prodigy Kyle Shepherd and musician Shane Cooper. They make a superb ensemble.

Employing music, poetry, dance, skits, documentary and interview video footage, they get their message across in a clear and humorous way. Henegan has dressed the show well, but the shape is problematic, without a coherent trajectory. Ironically, although dealing with ‘gam taal’ and street talk, it feels oddly cerebral and emotionally disinvested. Perhaps, it’s because the very good-looking cast are all male, except for Pearl. One of the principle cast members having to drop out at the last moment didn’t help.

But without a doubt this show is full of rewards and should be seen. So: “Aweh my bru! Koppel die lyne” (Hey! Spread the word).

April 19, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , | Comments Closed

The Train Driver (Fugard Theatre) Until April 18

Photo: Ruphin Coudyzer

Athol Fugard’s latest play, The Train Driver, which had its world première here, is his most intriguing since the advent of democracy. It is not as resolved a work as Exits and Entrances; it suffers the same monologue-heavy, undramatic radio play quality of Booitjie and the Oubaas, but it is braver, less contrived, far more on target than either Victory or Coming Home. It is also ingenious.

Roelf Visagie (Sean Taylor) is a train driver with post-traumatic stress disorder after a black woman with her baby strapped to her back committed suicide by placing herself under his engine. The true story on which this is based is even more horrific. The suicide (Pumla Lolwana) took two more children with her, one of whom she pulled back on to the tracks when the child tried to escape. Perhaps this created too many moral ambiguities for Fugard, but Roelf (and Fugard) is strangely neglectful on the dimension the death of the infant should bring; his beef is with the mother. Tracking down her body to confront her ghost leads Roelf to a Godforsaken graveyard outside Motherwell, where Simon Hanabe (Owen Sejake) buries the unclaimed corpses of the nameless. Packs of feral dogs and equally ferocious gangs of dehumanised young men prowl the area.

The characterisation of Simon is rudimentary and uncomfortable; he is the familiar, epigrammatic rustic with a common sense that is at once comical and full of wisdom. His dynamic with Roelf often feels antediluvian, but Sejake has a gigantic stage presence and is utterly compelling.

For his part, Taylor is hammy, and when Roelf mentally breaks down early on, Taylor elicits laughs. Very oddly, Roelf keeps bursting into Afrikaans and then translating in English; it rings false, destroying our suspension of disbelief. Taylor these days seems to have a hard enough time just doing a South African accent. The play would be stronger in Afrikaans, with Roelf speaking in his mother tongue.

But the ingenuity of The Train Driver lies in that collision between the unstoppable subject and its immovable object. What Fugard has uniquely articulated for us at last, like no other playwright, is the dilemma of white guilt and its existential anguish; the counterintuitive truth that we are responsible for the destruction we cause but over which we have no control.

April 10, 2010 | Tags: , , | Comments Closed

Klein Karoo Nasionalse Kunstefees 2010

The Famished Road on at the KKNK 2010


The KKNK starts in Oudsthoorn this weekend, and adopts some of the most substantial innovations since its inception in 1995. A day pass will give access to a range of musical acts, stalls and fleamarkets on the western bank of the Grobbelaarsrivier. It is hoped this will solve pedestrian congestion outside the venues in the main street area. The idea is to divide the town into a number of neighbourhoods (a ‘Museum’ area with restaurants, a Theatre district), each with a distinct character.

This year, some 35 productions will premiere at the festival, including several site-specific works.

Among the works the festival highlights are: Marita van der Vyver’s Vergenoeg adapted as a musical, staring Sandra Prinsloo, Milan Murray and Alexa Strachan; Yasmina Reza latest play, God of Carnage, translated into Afrikaans and directed by Hennie van Greunen; Betésda staged at the municipal swimming-pool with Nicola Hanekom, Nicole Holm, Bronwyn van Graan, Grant Swanby, Eben Genis and Neels van Jaarsveld; the drag queen duo Mince will for the first time be at the festival with Mincing in die Klein Karoo; Die proponentjie celebrates playwright Pieter Fourie’s 70th birthday; a brand new open-air amphitheatre on the Jamstreet farm will open with Chris Barnard’s Taraboemdery; Arthur Miller’s Dood van ‘n verkoopsman in a new translation directed by Bobby Heaney; Gary Gordon’s First Physical Theatre Company have created So loop ‘n volstruis. More than half of the theatre shows on the programme are comic dramas, farce or stand-up comedy.

It would appear that festival CEO, Brett Pyper, who took over the reins a couple of years ago, and his team are successfully reinvigorating the festival on several fronts.

April 1, 2010 | Comments Closed

Lovaffair

Photo: Igor Polzenhagen

The Flipside @ The Baxter Theatre is a new performance venue (with 216 seats) in the backstage area of the Baxter Theatre. Remix Dance Company, which celebrates their 10th year this year, will initiate the space with their latest work entitled Lovaffair.

Remix aim to bring together more and more differently-abled performers (some of them are wheelchair dependent) onto South African stages and to develop integrated dance locally. They recognise that each person’s body holds their personal as well as their social history. The company seeks, through its work, to simultaneously entertain, educate, and challenge attitudes and policies in the human rights area, in particular, social and cultural attitudes towards dance, gender and disability. Audience development within the disabled communities where access is difficult is a particular concern.

The five-member, full-time company comprises Malcolm Black, Lee-anne Meyer, Nadine Mckenzie, Andile Vellem and Marlin Zoutman. Ina Wichterich-Mogane directs Lovaffair, with Nadine Mckenzie as assistant to the director; choreography is by the company. Adding another dimension are actor, director and composer Bongile Mantsai and performer Chuma Sopotela.

Remix has built a good reputation for innovative and quality work, and several of their productions can be regarded as groundbreaking for South Africa.

March 27, 2010 | Tags: | Comments Closed
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