Infecting the City started today. It’s an event not to be missed.
The stewardship around arts festivals in South Africa has tended to be inward-looking, seeing them as primarily opportunities for ‘creative industries’ as it is collectively bastardized in government-speak. Economic stakeholders, such as government, sponsors, local business and the town fathers, see festivals as bait. An extant theatre audience welcomes such events as specially laid-on smorgasbords. As for audience development and outreach, these are viewed less as a core motivation, but more often as a means to assuage political imperatives such as public sponsorship and democratic propriety.
Challenging these notions is Infecting the City (ITC), the provocative and somewhat disconcertingly named arts festival that takes place annually in Cape Town.
ITC arose from the transformation of the former Spier Performing Arts Festival. The Spier festival used to be staged in a conventional amphitheatre on the Spier wine farm, featuring opera, drama and music. The Africa Centre, which creates several platforms for exploring contemporary Pan-African arts, decided to move the festival into the heart of the city.
Performances are free, held during the daytime in public spaces within walking distance of each other, scheduled to allow patrons to move from one performance to the next. Curious bystanders join festival-goers; bemused office workers crowd against the windows of their tower blocks; unsuspecting pedestrians find themselves in the middle of an artistic intervention. For those of us who saw last year’s performance in the Adderley Street fountains, the memory of that visual display still flickers in our minds whenever we pass there, in the same way that one can’t help but recall Christo’s wrapping whenever one sees the Reichstag in Berlin.
Infecting the City is curated by theatre director and playwright Brett Bailey. His ambition is to have high artistic expertise confront a social issue current in the public discourse, and to explore it in a space shared with the broader community – anywhere but in a theatre or a gallery.
This year’s theme is Human Rite, punning as it does both on human rights and rites as ritual. According to Bailey, “Cape Town is a beautiful City brimming with cultural diversity and about to explode with the euphoria of the World Cup. Yet it is also a city marked by inequality, violence and division; deeply scarred by human rights violations.”
Cape Town is “defined by the marginalisation of many people, and the suppression of their stories and their memories”. If you were in any doubt, the mere suggestion that the festival would commence with an animal sacrifice created a stream of praise from some sectors and a torrent of abuse from others. I suspect Bailey was playing a hoax this time, but the enfant terrible, even if he happens to be vegetarian, has offended before.
The flagship works arise from collaborations co-ordinated by the festival. The artists, are drawn from different creative disciplines and several continents. The collaborative process is through a residency during which the artists are immersed in an intensive orientation course.
Meet Market, a reference to the sale of slaves on Church Square, involves our own Andrew Buckland, Greek choreographer Athina Vahla, Amsterdam-based conceptual artist Ibrahim Quraishi, and performance artist Lerato Shadi.
Quiet Emergency, which takes place on Thibault Square, is a weeklong experiment involving street children, sex workers, security guards, street cleaners and performing artists Anthea Moys, Harare-based Gilbert Douglas, and Australian director Margie Mackay.
Artist Beezy Bailey is courting parochial outrage with his Dancing Jesus – two life-sized bronze sculptures of the Christ figure. Without the cross, Jesus appears to be dancing. One is in high heels. Dancer Karabo Maithufi (recently seen as Shimbleshanks in Cats) in a loin cloth and wearing a crown of thorns, will tap dance between the sculptures.
The Treacle Theatre group have spent weeks researching the history of place names in the city. They will conduct alternative tours and intriguing experiments to investigate our current wave of name changes.
The Delville Wood Memorial in the Company Gardens and the Golden Acre shopping centre, will be ‘interrupted’ by Imperfections, a dance work exploring the ghosts that inhabit or surround these sites.
The Free Flight Dance Company present Windows Into a World on Pier Place, dancing interpretations of the biographies of several people living with HIV.
Keep an eye out too for the A Collective, a ‘flash mob of 27 silent, eye-catching artists’ dressed in grey, who will be out to subtly subvert city routine.
For the duration of the festival, the public may bring personal mementos to build a temporary physical and visual blog called The Wishing Wall, while the eco-conscious public art group, Such Initiative, will create a mandala from sand and natural materials collected from sites of human rights violations.
During the week, Kelly Wainwright will invite members of the public to be photographed jumping on a queen-sized bed in the city centre. Previous jumpers have included Desmond Tutu and fishermen in Kalk Bay Harbour.
No one seems quite sure what to expect from Chinese performance artist Hua Jiming. In 2001, he crawled on the Great Wall of China with his partner and son. He will apparently mask himself in newspapers from Cape Town and Beijing and take to our streets.
The festival promises a riot of public art on the streets that goes well beyond parades, jugglers and stilt walkers.
For more information on the festival see: www.infectingthecity.com
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