National Arts Festival 2006

Grahamstown is again willingly bracing itself to receive its annual R50 million injection playing host for ten days to the National Arts Festival (NAF). This, despite rapid growth – both in the number of new festivals springing up around the country and their attendance. The Klein Karroo Nasionale Kunstefees (KKNK) may only have half the number of productions, but has overtaken the NAF by about 30% in ticket sales. Yet nothing beats the Grahamstown event for breadth, variety and (to use that uniquely South African term coined by Government Communications) ‘representivity’.

Although the festival is showing a subtle trend towards regionalism, artists from every corner of the republic are here with 494 productions at the last count. Pulling patrons away are the festivals in other provinces, while interventions by the Eastern Cape Provincial government are pushing the participation of Eastern Cape groups. It’s a welcome change from being in many ways the orphan province under the previous dispensation.

Further proof that when there is political will and a few officials with initiative things start to develop, is found in the Limpopo Province. It has no state funded theatre and its artists receive 2% of the National Arts Council budget, yet here they are with six productions. Last year it was one.

Artists have come from the rest of Africa too, including a jazz group from Zimbabwe, dancers from Ethiopia, The Committed Artists of Namibia (with a political piece called The Porridge Queen), and dramatic troupes from Swaziland, Botswana and Malawi (bringing a Norwegian co-production of Ibsen’s A Doll House, entitled Breaking the Pot), but its not nearly as many as one would expect from the biggest arts festival on the continent.

From further abroad, the largest foreign presence – dozens of artists from Europe and the Americas – are at the Standard Bank Jazz Festival and the New Music Indaba. The latter has as a theme re-imagining Mozart, and even includes a compoistion for piano and cellphone.

Despite the hugely varied nature of the festival, the centre of gravity remains drama – still the largest part of the main and fringe programmes. Predictably, theatre on the main is dominated by pro-active impresarios like Pieter Toerien, the dynamic theatres like the Market and the Baxter (which alone accounts for a third of the programme), while our state theatres – Artscape, Civic, Playhouse, PACOFs have almost no presence.

Festivals are for trying out new work, and there are almost 50 premieres this time. The most notable is Athol Fugard’s latest play Booitjie and the Oubaas and Coupé by Standard Bank Young Artist Award Winner for Drama, Sylvaine Strike. A noteworthy influence this year are the many new productions arising from the Performing Arts Network of South Africa (PANSA) Festival of Contemporary Theatre Readings, such as Three Dozen Roses, Peter Krummeck’s iVirgin Boy and Mike van Graan’s Some Mothers’ Sons.

Although there are many recognisable names from the veteran guard of actors and stalwart theatre practitioners – the Ellenbogens (Great White), Zakes Mda (We Shall Sing for the Fatherland) Marthinus Basson (Thneed for Life and Laughing Wild), Robert Kirby (The Secret Letters of Jan van Riebeeck), Christopher Weare (Bonhoeffer), Peter Hayes (The Tricky Part) – though no sign of Des and Dawn for once – many seasoned patrons (and a few seasoned critics I’ve met) seem baffled by the flood of young artists and theatre groups on the fringe, mostly black and still largely unknown.

One of these, which cancelled at the last minute, titled 100% Zuluboy…Burn the Bitch was probably too good to be true. The NAF remains the only festival with no selection panel and an open fringe. Looking at the blurbs for the shows it is therefore either a democratic platform reflecting the state of the national conscience or a bias in funding criteria. The new black work is overwhelmingly concerned with social issues – women and child abuse, rape as a cure to HIV – or in one case the lack of delivery: “this play is a scathing indictment against the government’s indifference” it declares, but concludes as “told by Mawilla, the local dagga-smoking social commentator”.

The artists are getting more media savvy, but some of the synopses raise eyebrows – “The son conspires to murder his father after an Indian steals the cheque from them”.

Almost a third of the fringe is performed in English with an African language. Afrikaans too is up from one to six productions this year, but nothing near to the vital force it used to be. It’s rather myopic on the side of producers given the potential audience from Port Elizabeth alone.

There are as usual a glut of one-person stand-ups and comic duos, with some reliable returns – Black Mamba, Hoot, The Most Amazing Show, Moron than Off, and promising new work from Gaetan Smit (The Dog’s Bollocks), Sonia Esguera (Porra), and Rob van Vuuren (Electric Juju) to mention a few.

Physical theatre remains a strong component, but sadly, this year’s festival sees 16 Kinds of Emptiness as the swan song of Gary Gordon’s brilliant First Physical Theatre Company, which officially launched at the NAF in 1993. It’s all the more cruel when you consider they were a finalist a few years ago in the Arts and Culture Trust’s category for Best Funded Project.

Student Theatre is still budding, and this year the City Varsity Cape Town has joined in with Rob Murray’s Dumbshow.

The visual arts component is the largest in the history of the festival with 39 registered exhibitions, compelling the organisers to produce its own route map. The highlight is Churchill Madikida’s Like Father Like Son? which is itself a dramatic personal narrative.

A first for the festival is a programme of urban performance poetry including Black Reflections with Prophet JD, a tribute to the Soweto uprisings thirty years ago. There are also plenty of poems in book and talks on books at the Wordfest.

And if all this live entertainment is too much, patrons can retire to the film festival, which includes the premieres of Richard E. Grant’s Wah-Wah and Dornford-May’s Son of Man.

June 30, 2006 | Comments Closed

Going to St. Ives (Theatre on the Bay)

St Ives

In the wake of African Renaissance punditocracy, peer review window dressing, Washington-consensus style initiatives like NEPAD, and most recently the paperback Our Common Interest – inspired by the haughty Tony Blair, Lee Blessing’s recent Off Broadway success Going to St. Ives stands to be accused of perpetuating Afro-pessimism.

Blessing, who mastered this type of brinkmanship duologue in his Tony Award winning Cold War piece A Walk in the Woods (1988), sets up a Faustian style bargain between May N’Kame – the dowager mother of an African dictator (who echoes Idi Amin, Emperor Bokassa and Charles Taylor) – and Dr Cora Gage, a rather sad British eye surgeon.

Cora is played with great certitude by the dependable Fiona Ramsay. Equally authoritative is the polished hand of director Alan Swerdlow, who has here produced a solid, elegant piece of theatre. Swerdlow keeps the dialogue up-tempo, while well-chosen music from the Cameroon and mbiras from Zimbabwe resonate movingly.

Pamela Nomvete (the lead in Zulu Love Letter) has the right gravitas and makes for a powerful matriarchal May, with her crystal enunciation. As a black woman, she explains in the play, she had to be twice as English as the English to gain cachet. The script favours her too – giving May the punchier lines. When Cora refers to ‘human beings’ she interrupts with “don’t make snap judgements” and scrutinising the heirloom tea service remarks, “what is it, two hundred years out of fashion now?”

An intelligent, often intensely personal and wonderfully unpredictable play, it reaches far beyond simplistic political themes and ideological sparring. Lessing however belabours his rather tangential symbolism, like the blue willow pattern china that seems to represent ancestry and a transcendent civilising bond between the two women.

Theatre on the Bay has had good plays and strong performers of late. Although it is gratifying to see serious dramatic works in a commercial venue that must survive without subsidy, it is a pity budgets did not allow more than a few marooned flats to suggest a set. It could have been close to perfect.

Plays like St. Ives reward the individual in meaningful ways that far exceed the hype of Band Aid rock concerts. Meanwhile the African dictators remain legion, many with names hardly recognised in the West: Teodoro Obiang Nguema, Omar Bongo, Idriss Déby, Al-Bashir…

Going to St Ives revisited

In my notice on Going to St Ives I said the play will stand accused of perpetuating Afro-pessimism and it seems that this has materialised among friends, and I’m accused of playing in to it by listing some of the current dictators in Africa.

However, as I saw it, I understood Lessing as wanting to create a complex drama around ethics and moral dilemmas, and for this, he needed an absolute monster and perhaps rather predictably settled on the first cliché that came to mind – an African monster – modelled mostly on now defunct regimes, yet containing sufficient truth. A staggering number of regimes still use widespread torture. I list a few at the end of my review. There are also in many countries pockets and backyards of ‘legitimate’ regimes where as an example heads really are chopped off in market places. My blind spot was that I have a hangover from defending Brett Bailey’s Big Dada years ago against widespread PC condemnation. It opened after a rehearsal period, which saw three democratically elected (far from free and fair) leaders change their country’s constitutions to extend their terms indefinitely. This time I didn’t re-examine the debate in the light of developments on the continent in recent years.

But I am far from being on the side of a whole lot of old-fart African gainsayers who might have taken nothing from the play, but its background vision of Africa. I should have qualified the way I fore grounded this in my review. So here goes…

Firstly though, I don’t think a writer should be blamed for the projections on to his work, which I know a certain segment of the audience manufactured: that the atrocities of African leaders are worse than atrocities committed by the Western powers all over the world – in the case of the USA – or that they are more barbaric to their own countrymen – witness Bosnia, the Kurds, and of course the Holocaust just 60 years ago in the centre of ‘civilisation’ to put pay to that. Africa has never seen that kind of factory killing, but on a second thought had they the bureaucracy and access to the funds and technology I’m sure we would have seen gas chambers in Rwanda. “Manunkind” as e.e.cummings put it. This is not in Lessing’s script.

I am also extremely wary of dismissing a play, because it isn’t the play I would have liked to see. It is not the job of writers to do PR for political correctness. What if we applied the same sensitivity to image and political correctness to plays not of Africa? A terrifying thought. I also don’t automatically assume that a play is about today and the here and now. I thought it was written in the late 1990s – it felt that way (laser eye surgery for glaucoma has been performed in British hospitals since 1979). It was published in 2003, and has only received critical attention in theatres in 2005. I’m sure Lessing’s vision of Africa is informed by the mainstream media abroad, which kept Charles Taylor’s atrocities in the public conscience. He was toppled in 2003.

I don’t think St Ives is rendered artistically illegitimate because of its now dated background scenario. Rather, what is worthwhile examining is why this play is performed now, and the audience it attracts in this country.

The play is about ethical and moral dilemmas. It is hypothetical. I framed my review with the African issues, as the questions it raises on the moral front required more ink than I had space to discuss and is impossible to review without giving the game away. The joy of this play was for me that it is one of the few instances in what must be a couple of years now that I couldn’t predict the ending by interval.

I fully agree that the problem is that the play invites a stereotyped vision and it would have been a far more interesting play, artistically better too, had the background been about the new democratic dictators and the subtlety involved there. In short, Lessing needs to update his image of the dictator. He made the moral dilemma of assassination too easy. However, at the end, we do get the impression that new forces of revenge genocide have been unleashed by May’s act, and the problem hasn’t been solved.

However ghastly the hypocrisy of the West and their own atrocities, and however sensitive we are about the much abused image of our continent, it would be terrifying if we create no-go zones around political correctness. There are monsters in charge of many African countries as I write this and we need to face up to the fact that the continent (no matter how politically inconvenient this is) remains in a bad way and the statistics are not improving for the majority. The most encouraging development was Sudan not being allowed the presidency of the African Union. Theatrical amplification is a problem if it is racist – and Lessing can’t be accused of that.

The recent tide of political correctness – I list in the opening of my review- is a major threat to the forgotten masses of Africa. I’m not convinced Africa is changing as much as we hope – only its image. The dictators are less overtly crude, less honest – that is more Western in their brutality. Africa’s big men have been admitted into the world club I suppose. No more ‘Emperor’, rather ‘CEO of country X Inc’. Corporate pillage is as rife as ever. The most terrifying development is that these men are attaining legitimacy. Meanwhile Geldolf and co are a sick joke.

June 16, 2006 | Tags: , , | Comments Closed

Fresh at the National Arts Festival

Perhaps the most inspiring work I saw at the festival this year was a programme of four short works by new young South African choreographers. The wrote the following article for Cue.

“How do we grow choreographers?” Jay Pather, National Arts Festival Committee member, asks rhetorically, “what we do is give them a space”. Fellow committee member Suzette le Sueur adds: “Fresh is a platform for choreographers that don’t have companies; there hasn’t been (one) on the festival for a while”.

According to Pather, the new discourses in South African dance “have paralleled and in some instances superseded…the theatre”. He ascribes this, possibly, to the fact that the body is a more universally readable, yet “richer source for indigenous ways of construing identities…I think dance tends to be edgier”.

Pather emphasises that Fresh is a process – the outcome of which nobody can predict. He believes the notion that there is some pre-existing ideal to aspire towards, has been a failing in some contemporary dance.

The concept is to remove dictates around theme, style and space, but “not to take away completely the notion of performance…because it is not performance art in the sense that it can’t happen on a road where there is no one watching, it’s not a happening.”

The initial curatorial vision was to perform the works concurrently in a cavernous space, taking the audience on a circuitous route, creating a sense that “these things are happening simultaneously in various parts of the country”. This was not possible due to the lack of a suitable venue, but they have hopes for next year.

Four works were chosen. Quicksand and (Bosol) Prison are conventional in their definition of a circumscribed performance space, while Silhouette and Plasticization are as Pather puts it on “the edges of visual art and the edges of dance…people like Steven Cohen have really pioneered that…I think that the visual arts world has taken note”.

Our dance scene has suffered from a tendency to promote good dancers into choreographic positions, when many are not up to it. Siyanda Duma is an exception – his choreography for Quicksand is as exciting as his dancing. He enters with a riveting set of rapid pantsula steps ending in high, wheeling kicks. Immediately one recognises the vigorous new energy our companies need. Stripping off eight conventional jackets and blazers, he reveals that like the rest of the dancers on stage, he is trussed up in a clinical white straightjacket.

Duma crafts fine moments as the performers play with concepts of physical equilibrium and mental balance. However, the ensemble work though passable was untidy; the music was pleasing but hackneyed – the Dead Can Dance sound has been done to death in contemporary dance, and Duma’s choreographic freshness was diminished by his musical choices.

Duma says the work should not be misread as depicting insanity, rather it is about the “the limitations we all have, and trying to redefine ourselves within those”.

The youngest of the four choreographers is self-taught Lucky Kele. For nine months he held dance classes for inmates at Boksburg Prison (‘Bosol’). Bosol (Prison) is based on “exploring how one can survive a prison space…how would one adapt to that life?”

Kele hails from Kathlehong with its strong pantsula tradition and it’s evident in his work. Few choreographers are capable of inventing new movement, but Kele demonstrates a knack for successfully trying new ways. It was most unfortunate that due to a ligament injury, Kele was unable to dance in his piece as planned.

In Bosol four dancers in Guantanamo orange uniforms stage fluidly choreographed fights, scenes of prison rape and victimisation, but with a delicacy that achieves greater impact than any Tarantino graphicness.

Kele uses the idea of a prison to ask the greater existential question about how we accommodate and find answers for the terrible and arbitrary things that happen to us in life.

Nelisiwe Xaba’s solo Plasticization also deals with restriction of freedom and movement. She enters wearing a mask and wrapped in a ‘China bag’, those blue, white and red chequered plastic bags that used to be made of woven material before they were ‘plasticized’.

Xaba says: “It’s about this love and hate relationship with plastic, how it protects us, but also how nature can’t take it, you need condoms but…”

It’s a delightful, witty solo piece, performed almost entirely from within the bag. Four ‘characters’ emerge, each represented only by a leg with a shoe: a ballerina, a gumboot dancer, a chorus girl, and a man (or a woman) doing pantsula.

About her work Xaba says, “I call what I do theatre-dance for now…I prefer to be directed by someone from a theatre background not dance…Warona Seane (director) comes from pure theatre”.

Mlu Zondi’s Silhouette premiered in Paris last year. It too is a theatrical piece, with text by Ntando Cele (of Tin Bucket Drum). He presents two grotesque, almost burlesque caricatures of stereotyped male and female identity. The male is lascivious, insatiable, and abusive. The female is spontaneous, organic – she farts and spits – but these are male prerogatives, and for violating them, she is inescapable typecast as slatternly and whorish.

Zondi says: “I like to find new ways of saying things…I did train in dance but I was in drama school, so there’s a lot of acting”.

During the performance, video artist Momelezi Ntshiba roams about the stage documenting what is happening with closed-circuit projections. Zondi is questioning the methodology of knowledge acquired through observation alone, asking the audience to question their own interpretation of the performance, arrived at from “a spectator point of view with no engagement”.

All four choreographers expressed their appreciation for the opportunity to showcase their work at the Festival.

Remix Dance

A healthy appreciation of the human body and its expression through movement should go far beyond the ‘perfect’ specimens normally associated with the dance world. The Remix Dance Company (founded in 2001) creates dance works by bringing “together people with different body histories, types and abilities”. Unlike the Paralympics, which is a competitive forum for people with comparable physical disability, Remix seeks to integrate ‘differently enabled’ bodies with ‘fully able-bodied’ dancers.

Sensitivities around the language reflect the prejudices that must be overcome. Dancer, Malcolm Black, says his not offended by the term ‘disabled’, but prefers ‘with disability’. Remix avoids work that elicits charity or provokes sympathy, but people still clapped during the show when he executed a difficult movement.

The Remix dance quartet is making its debut at the Festival, and it’s Black first time in Grahamstown. He’s a young man, with a handsome, strikingly symmetrical face. “It’s amazing to be in such a vibey place…where theatre is the number one thing!” Black lives with a neuromuscular disease called Fredericks Ataxia. Though not paraparetic, he is wheelchair dependent.
Black’s motto is “any body [that’s two words] can dance.”

The other members of the quartet include Andile Vellem, who is deaf, and two strong, ‘non-disabled’ dancers, Nicola Visser and the Mpotseng Shuping. Visser is an exceptionally graceful and expressive danseuse.

To Pieces is a double bill. I can’t give you anything but love is based on the Billy Holliday song of the same title and choreographed by Ina Wichterich. When first performed a year ago, Visser e-mailed me excitedly: “I feel that we have created something very true, very funny, very disquieting, very beautiful.”

The piece opens with Vellem signing the first line of the song to the audience.
The dancers work less as a quartet, and more often as four solo performers, each using a different language: sign language, Xhosa, English and Afrikaans. Visser says: “Love is so simple, in essence, but it gets messed up when you start trying to talk about it”.

It’s a playful, slightly mischievous piece – deconstructing the ‘fourth wall’ when Black takes a cellphone call in the middle of the performance. Its challenging work on several levels and requires the audience to hand themselves over to the experience. Visser says some audiences are “discomfited” by it.

The uniqueness of the bodies requires that choreographers be invited to create specific works for Remix. It’s an advantageous way of working even for regular companies as all bodies have their limitations.

Second Time Broken is choreographed by Adam Benjamin of the UK, a pioneer in this field of dance. It uses fragile, white porcelain pots in a progression of sizes, which when suspended near to each other in the dancers’ hands, appear as segments of a single large vessel. Visser says the pots “have a story in them… I want you to hold one of these pots, to know”.

The original musical score by Neo Muyanga includes the sound of shattering ceramics. Black interprets: “To find the whole, things must first break, before…you find wholeness again”.

Both works have memorable moments of intense beauty and pain, but lack continuity. The exposed wings of the Centenary Hall exaggerate these periods of stasis.

Speaking of the venue, Black remarks on the difficulties facing the performers in simply getting between the toilets backstage and the performance space. “Please also mention,” he asks, “that the Village Green doesn’t have a single toilet for wheelchairs, even though portable loos for this purpose are available and easily set up.”

June 6, 2006 | Tags: , , , , , , | Comments Closed

The King of Laughter (Baxter)

King of Laughter
Encountering the individual human faces of those caught on the ground as the doctrines of social engineering work their way out is seldom pleasant – often forcing one to question even the noblest legislation. One such face is that of Barry Sutherland, the central character referred to in the title of Craig Freimond’s The King of Laughter.

Barry is the perfect vehicle for veteran actor James Borthwick, who is on stage throughout the 70 minutes: a grouchy, mid-fifty, serial divorcee at the peak of his professional acumen. Specialised in fitting canned laughter to television sitcoms he is more of an artist than a sound engineer.

Barry is about to be ‘hoofed’ – forced unceremoniously into early retirement – made into glue like an old horse as he phrases it with poignant humour. He has two months to train his young affirmative action replacement, Jerome. Upping the moral ante is the fact that Jerome (Wayne van Rooyen) is on the face of it patently unsuitable – he has absolutely no sense of humour.

The otherwise television styled script – mostly mildly amusing family sitcom routine in irritatingly short takes that have the lights wincing on and off like a migraine – at last crosses into live theatre when Barry must teach Jerome laughter meditation. Van Rooyen does well as the classic straight-faced stooge – particularly effective when the contagious laughter spills over from the audience into feigned corpsing on stage.

It’s a humanising comedy with ‘respect’ at its fulcrum. If there is any villainy it is the faceless corporate directors implementing policy with cold commercial tyranny. Barry conquers his chagrin – in the end passing on to Jerome his most precious possession – his lifetime collection of laughter-takes. Jerome, with a little nurturing can rightfully feel he has achieved his new position and is not just another epigone. Starting from an unpromising situation, this is a hopeful and remedial story of co-operation, resourcefulness and mutual respect.

June 2, 2006 | Tags: , | Comments Closed