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

London Road (Kalk Bay Theatre) Until April 10

Photo: Christine Gouws

Young playwright Nicholas Spagnoletti has made a notable debut with London Road, his first fully produced play (and a nice coup too to have Lara Bye direct).

As someone who lived for a while in the actual London Road in Sea Point, and watched it almost disintegrate in the 1990s and then regenerate, I can vouch for the veracity of the work. The text is a pleasant mix of inventive comedy and tragedy, familiar and resonant for many local theatre patrons.

In a series of short vignettes (the entire duration is just under 60 minutes), it charts the friendship to fruition of two unlikely soul mates brought together by their determination to triumph over circumstance: Rosa (Robyn Scott), a young, illegal immigrant and drug peddler, and Stella (Ntombi Makhutshi), a lonely, elderly Jewish widow whose family has emigrated.

Although Makhutshi gives a fine, nuanced, and well-judged performance, Scott tends to dominate, mostly because the script is unbalanced; Rosa is far more realised as a role. Scott is as always reliably comic (Rosa would fit in perfectly as one of NBC TV’s The Golden Girls), yet touchingly vulnerable as the frailties of age overtake her character. The characters themselves are fresh; the scenario novel yet quite plausible; and Spagnoletti has both a good ear for dialogue and a camp sense of humour.

Overall, it is one of the better straight play texts (in the sense that it is a dramatic dialogue for actors) seen in a while in Cape Town. This is indeed promising new work.

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

Out the Box Festival – March 20 to 28

http://www.outtheboxfestival.com/

http://www.outtheboxfestival.com/


In Cape Town, it seems just as one festival ends, another starts; incontrovertible proof of an indomitable creative spirit and a vibrant artists’ community. Moreover, a number of these festivals are breaking new ground and staging works in the very vanguard of the arts.

The Out the Box festival, which consists of an adult, family and film programme, as well as workshops and talks, has moved from September (a month itself filled with art events, such as the unique and only one of its kind in the world, Voorkamer performing arts festival) to March, where it is in good company with the pioneering Infecting the City public arts festival.

Out the Box (OTB) focuses on ‘visual performance’, on collaborative and experimental works that dissolve the boundaries between performance and visual art. Several of the works are site specific. Included in the line-up for the Adult Festival this year are international performance artists and contemporary dancers: Duda Paiva (Netherlands) with Angel; Edna Jaime (Mozambique) with her provocative work (Eu) peca de terra-II; Baba Yaga Theatre (Denmark) with Inua; Benjamin Vandewalle (Belgium) with Skindsideout. From Tel Aviv, Israel, comes The Avital Dvory Visual Theatre Company’s magical realist piece Tranquila, integrating theatre, circus arts, puppetry, clowning and music. The organizers are quick to add that they support “peace through cultural exchange” and “do not host artists as a political statement . . . we are in negotiations with Palestinian puppeteers to attend OTB in 2011”.

Among the local works are Quack!, Acty Tang’s Inscrutable, and Mothertongue Theatre’s The Baggage of Bags, as well as several intriguing new works by emerging theatre makers.

The festival is staged at the Baxter Theatre and in various venues on Hiddingh Campus, Orange Street.

Ticket prices are very reasonable (R35 for family festival shows) and there are various discounts and multi-pass options.

Book early at Computicket.

March 12, 2010 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

Ikhwezi Theatre Festival (Baxter Theatre) March 11 to 20

The worthy but poorly publicized annual Ikhwezi Theatre Festival, a developmental programme of original South African plays by community theatre groups opens next week. Festival Director Itumeleng Wa-Lehulere, who has nurtured the festival, is not it seems adequately supported on the marketing front. Like many such initiatives, the concerns are in-house, getting the works staged, running workshops, mentoring the talent, and not it seems on attracting an audience.

Information on the works is as scant as ever, but the M&G would like to bring this festival to your attention.

Ikhwezi is isiXhosa for the planet Venus as the morning star, a guiding light. Wa-Lehulere explains, “The fruits of our work are evident through the success of the young theatre-makers who have already made a name for themselves and the different productions which cut their theatrical teeth here…We cannot deny South Africa the platform which Ikhwezi offers”. This is true enough, though Itsoseng, Dens Wit Me and this year’s The Crossing were already developed elsewhere.
Ikhwezi gave them a crucial leg up, and for many community groups, this is their big break.

In the year after celebrating its first decade, Ikhwezi was in danger of closing down from lack of funds. It was to be downscaled to only six productions this year, but there are now twelve works listed.

There are always notable directors at work; this time – Maurice Podbury directs Vusi Mazibuko’s wonderfully titled A Plague of Heroes, Bo Petersen directs Jonathan Khumbulani Nkala’s The Crossing (the true story of Nkala’s journey from the small dusty village of Kwe Kwe in Zimbabwe to Cape Town; Rob van Vuuren directs Shimmy Isaacs’s Allie Pad Funny Worcester.
There are works in several languages and productions are under 60 minutes. Go to PDF for schedules.

March 5, 2010 | Tags: , | Comments Closed