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.
