Trophies from Eden (Anna Louw)
Trophies from Eden (Steven Afrikaner)
A Place in the Sun (Mathilda Joseph)
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
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
The violence distinguished by its xenophobic character that spread like a bushfire through communities in May last year is now out of the public eye, but the wounds inflicted have not healed and the core issues fester unaddressed. While our politicians wrangle around an upcoming election and a corrupt Department of Home Affairs continues to mismanage immigration, there are ominous threats of it happening again. The country’s self-image is permanently fissured and the tarnish on its international aura lingers. This year Infecting the City, Spier’s annual performing arts festival, will facilitate how ordinary Capetonians, at least intellectually, think about this traumatic aftermath.
Criminal violence against foreigners has been on-going for many years. Sometimes the State itself sets the example. A few months before the mob riots, the police conducted a brutal midnight raid on the Methodist Church’s refugee centre in central Johannesburg without a warrant. Foreigners were pepper sprayed and beaten even though they did not resist arrest. Numerous civil society organisations condemned the abuse and detentions especially those of children and pregnant mothers.
Yet, the government’s ranks are full of people once exiled. The grassroots are ideologically Africanist. Many of today’s citizens were under apartheid labelled ‘illegals’, and have first-hand experience of dehumanising bureaucracy and arbitrary deportation.
Was the May violence a reinvention of similar divisions and dynamics in our recent past, such as existed between squatters, township and hostel dwellers, between fresh rural migrants and those who already held temporary permits, coloured and black, ‘witdoeke’ and ‘comrades’, shack lords and rival landlords? In May 1986, the community of old Crossroads, an icon of resistance to apartheid supported by such organisations as the Black Sash, went on the rampage against the surrounding squatter communities, methodically killing, burning and displacing over 70 000 people in a matter of weeks. In 2008 there were no signs of a third force, only the shameful omissions and political intriguing between the DA held city and ANC controlled province.
What are the lines we draw between self-preservation and empathy? What defines community? How do governments think about their people: as IDPs, aliens, voters or as individuals? How do we make sense of such gross betrayal and tragedy in our midst?
The festival’s artistic curator, Brett Bailey, has taken “Home Affairs” as the theme this year. He emphasises that most events are free, site-specific, in public spaces and, although pushing aesthetic and artistic boundaries, accessible.
Infecting the City kicks off with three site-specific works – Exile, Amakwerekwere and Limbo – the fruits of collaboration by performers, theatre directors, filmmakers, choreographers and fine artists from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Netherlands, United Kingdom and France.
Sam Pearce, who holds a PhD in Human Diversity Studies and was intimately involved in the crisis, co-ordinated a course for the visiting artists, which included having them ‘arrested’ and thrown into the back of a police van. They saw conditions for themselves – queuing at the Nyanga Home Affairs office from 5am, visiting the Soetwater and Blue Waters Refugee Camps. Each group was accompanied throughout by ‘guides’ from Congo Brazzaville, DRC and Zimbabwe, all members of the Joint Refugee Leadership Committee. In Masiphumelele township, the only community to publicly apologise to its foreign residents, the documentary Baraka was screened for locals for the first time. It centres on Abdi Sirej, an amicable Ethiopian shopkeeper, who was shot dead last November. A local pastor facilitated a lively discussion between the artists, local matriarchs, youths and refugee leaders.
The festival officially opens with a spectacular noon show at Riebeeck Square by three renowned French aerial performers from Retouramont, suspended from a crane in a sculptural trapezium of rope.
The German avant-garde theatre group, Rimini-Protokoll, in collaboration with the Callcenter Descon in India, make their South African debut with an intercontinental phone play, Call Cutta (currently also running as part of Urban Scenographies at the Drill Hall in Johannesburg).
In Fleet of Art, 12 artists will transform the backs of pick-up trucks into ‘invisible’ performance installations. The bakkies will roam the streets of the CBD displaying their “poignant and idiosyncratic loads”.
Another unusual event is Talking Heads, where members of the public have the opportunity to sit and talk to 4 out of 60 experts, randomly selected by ticket draw. This year’s participants include architects, politicians, Jungian psychologists, writers and agents provocateurs.
Other productions include Erf [81] Cultural Collective’s An Historical, taking audiences on a quirky, reinvented tour of The Castle. Magnet Theatre presents Ingcwaba Lendoda Lise Cankwe Ndlela (The Grave of the Man is Next to the Road), featuring Faniswa Yisa directed by Mandla Mbothwe. It sings the plight of South Africa’s migrants, “the physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual dislocation of young black South Africans whose origins lie a long way down the N2 in the Eastern Cape”. In Eyton Road, Australian-South African Talya Chalef meditates on her grandparents’ flight through the concentration camps of the Holocaust to her own experience of shifting cities.
The site specific nature of the works also draws inspiration from the ghosts of yesteryear and invites Capetonians to discover their city. The artists were intrigued to discover that the Camissa River still runs from Table Mountain to the sea and fish swim in it right under our feet beneath the asphalt. Hippopotami snorted in a vlei now covered by Church Square, and Thibault Square was once the Roggebaai fishing harbour.
Although it has still not been seen in South Africa, Brett Bailey’s The House of the Holy Afro has had successful runs in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Zimbabwe, Belgium and even Reunion Island. I finally catch it at the Edinburgh Festival. Quite unlike his other work, though carrying his signature stylistically, Afro is a quality ensemble funky camp club entertainment with house DJ Dino Moran (Ibiza, Ministry of Sound).
Bailey tells me how people have attempted to discuss the deeper symbolic meaning of the piece, such as the holy cross backdrop. “There isn’t any,” he insists. “I’m just having a bit of fun.”
The show balances cheap township tat, designer chic and pricey Vegas kitsch. As a theatre man, the acts that work best are those lead by the disguise of a charismatic character. Bailey sources a range of star iconography, from Adam Ant to Brenda Fassie. The entertainment runs the gamut of clubby reworkings of jive, gumboot dancing, Gospel and Afro-pop. Easily accessible, it’s uniquely popular in theatreland with young, late night audiences. And in Edinburgh, I saw a seventy-year-old dowager and her mousey husband tapping away with their feet to the Ugandan Yalimunyenye (“Ancestors, come down from the stars”).
At a seminar hosted by the Africa Consortium UK and The Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium (USA), Bailey is pointedly asked whether he isn’t pandering to European prejudice and exploiting African exoticism.
Bailey replies that he no longer carries his youthful arrogance. “I was naïve,” he says bluntly. This is not to deny the integrity and power of his early works. Artists must be allowed to experiment and find their way, and not be dictated to by academicians and ideologues. But he has learned lessons. Never, he says, will he bring works like iMumbo Jumbo to Europe again. Or Safari, his play about CG Jung’s central African travels. “I made the unforgivable mistake of dressing the Ugandan cast in red clay and raffia skirts. The standing ovations every night were patronising. They were not appreciating the quality of the performance.”
Yet even our official tourism marketers still promote our country with a luxuriously maned male lion and a Zulu with shield and an assegai. Looking at some of the brochures, you wouldn’t think we’d built a standing structure. “But,” counters Bailey, “when black cultural makers bring the same work it comes from the pride of a nation.”
I recall the opening night of Umoja at Artscape. There were German coach tourists with binoculars unabashedly ogling the topless African singers, while several of Cape Town’s recognisable black politicians were beaming and cheering that ‘our people’ had taken the hallowed main stage.
Bailey says he now makes works with either Europe or local audiences in mind. He does not translate works into another culture. Without the cultural literacy, Europeans cannot be blamed for seeing a work about witchcraft as whacky and absurd. “You can’t in theatre give the audience a cultural primer beforehand or some ethnographic display.” This was once seriously considered by his producing hosts.
Bailey has moved away from his initial trilogy – the plays of miracle and wonder. Recently, he has been accessing Greek mythological figures, such as Medea and Orpheus and making site-specific works.
He describes sitting in a tiny shack in Gugulethu where a goat was killed and as the red blood gushed on to the blue linoleum from China, on the television facing him Ridge and Brooke kissed in The Bold and the Beautiful.
“There is an extraordinary flavour of life in South Africa. So much that was previously dominated and destroyed is now bursting through.” The European structures and formats of theatre are no longer the be all and end all. Bailey achieves the apex of theatre – he transports his audience so thoroughly that we once again believe in the experience and ritual of theatre at the very core of what makes us to be human.
The world is taking note. Next year Bailey’s remade opera of Macbeth will tour to Austria, Switzerland, Greece and Germany and The House of the Holy Afro will tour Sydney, London and Zurich. Norrlands Opera, Sweden, have commissioned him to direct a new work. His production of Orfeus has been bought by Linz, Switzerland, which will be the European Cultural capital in 2009. Brett Bailey is co-curator with Jay Pather of the next Spier Arts Festival.
Abey Xakwe as the guide in Orfeus
Orfeus is in many ways a departure from Bailey’s previous ‘plays of miracle and wonder’, like IPI ZOMBI? and particularly iMUMBO JUMBO, both characterised by ritual and ceremony, and a dramatic plot that builds towards an apocalyptic climax sweeping the audience with it. These works were aggressive – about fire, blood and bone. Bailey broke down our defences with drums, screams, knives and broken glass. Possessed, we joined the Bacchae. You left his theatre charged up by the adrenalin of the experience, renewed through catharsis, liberated by the irrational.
In Orfeus, Bailey searches out softer tissue, our vulnerabilities, the marrow in our bones, the chasms in our souls. He uses our sympathies for the blind, the crippled, the broken and the voiceless to torture us. We engage with nature and the beauty of the landscape – a tranquil lake, rustling trees, rounded stones, reeds. This time we leave the theatre with senses heightened and reinvigorated, listening to the night-time sounds of the farm, taking in the stars with renewed enthusiasm. Something inside us has been unlocked.
The production is set outdoors on the fields around Spier starting at sunset. On arrival, one of the performers, the Frog – played by the highly accomplished third world bunfight stalwart Abey Xakwe – comes to fetch us. We see him from a distance with a listing gait, staff in hand, bare legged, sandaled feet. His hair has a braid of white Congolese cowry shells; he wears a dusty old, purple tailcoat. A fairytale character, Xakwe is a under five feet tall with a uniquely formed – some would say deformed – body. He has an intense stare and a commanding presence. The Frog instructs us to observe nature, not to talk to one another at anytime, and “never look back”.
We follow him, walking for ten-minutes in silence. We stick together, but we are solitary. It is the start of a dream.
The first vision is revealed when we emerge from a reed-lined path at a dam. Across the water, we have a perfect perspective of a small beach on the water’s edge. Underneath an isolated clump of gum-trees, there are grey figures lying prostrate, stirring slightly; a woman in a red dress, limping, is collecting water with a vessel, and appears to be nursing to them. We think of refugees, survivors, Odysseus’ shipwrecked sailors. It is a timeless scene, perfect in its configuration.
The limping figure is Alice (inspired by Lewis Carroll’s creation). She has paraparesis and lurches about in a polio victim’s boots with metal braces on her legs. Arriving at the beach, we see the grey figures are slug-like creatures crawling in the dirt, moaning in low tones, identical, anonymous, heads covered with mud-caked body-stockings, over them black rimmed spectacles – myopic like mole rats. Bailey describes them as ‘baboon people’. Alice begins to tell us the story.
The text itself is probably the greatest departure from Bailey’s established format. The narrative nature of his previous production, medEia, seems to have led into this. The last narrator per se, in Big Dada, was eaten on stage. This time the script is mostly a narrative poem, told by Alice, with only one other speaking character – the King (also the Lord of the Underworld). Frog speaks, but only to interpret or to instruct; Euydice (Bailey’s derivation of ‘Eurydice’) sings one song, Orfeus (Bailey’s derivation of ‘Orpheus’) also only sings – and in Lingala.
Narration is in theatre high-risk; it forces us to abstract ourselves from the action, to visualise what is told instead of composed before us. But by toning down the performances, Bailey has created a delicate and successfully balanced tripod between the story told to the audience by Alice, her interactions with the King and the characters, and their enactments of her narration. It is both a story-telling technique with traditional African roots, and a post-modern poem illustrated rather than acted out.
Faniswa Yisa (who also played the older Medea in medEia) plays Alice with her hair shaved and tied into doll-like knots, her delivery is mesmeric. The register of her voice makes her a tragedienne par excellence. I believe she is one of our greatest actors currently.
The audience is then seated under the trees on hay bales around a small stage of distressed cement blocks. On a platform to the side stands the King played by Luthando Mthi – dressed as a composite of those African kings who have as their royal wardrobe poor parodies of the Western crowns – a sort of tin-pot dictator in a ghastly dry land with the power of life and death over his subjects. He is the antithesis of Bailey’s charismatic Dada – this man is dull, his cruelty all the worse for its banality, a charmless nobody with the big gold key to Hades hanging around his neck.
Centre stage is a seated figure, covered by a white cloak. Alice removes the cloth, revealing Orfeus, with gold paint streaking his face, dressed in broderie anglais. Alice washes his feet, one of several messianic gestures in the play.
Orfeus starts to play his guitar, he swivels, facing the lake, playing to the trees, incorporating all. His beautiful melodic lines awaken the baboon creatures and they hearken to him. Soon, the King accuses him of sedition, but the power of the music is such that a brief insurrection chases the King back to his podium. Alice snatches the fairy-book styled key from his neck. Orfeus, defiant, plays on.
The music builds, but not the mad drumming of iMUMBO JUMBO, this is song-full, harmonious. The creatures are worked into a trance, banging river stones together. Yet there is something threatening in their worship of Orfeus and reverie, like the petting aggression of cats.
What follows is a spectacular moment – out of one of the grey chrysalises, emerges Euydice, also in virginal white. Ndumi Zweni who plays Euydice is a perfect counterpart to Bebe Lueki’s Orfeus. They both have the same instantly attractive delicate naivety and otherworldly air.
The music rises in celebration. This time a member of the audience becomes possessed, ripping off his clothes. Alice places a red stocking over his head, and he is wrapped in a patterned cloth. He skulks behind us in amongst the hay, hissing menacingly. “Go away snake!” says Alice and in one of those rare full stop moments in the script, she adds, “But snakes don’t take orders.”
In what should be a climax of transcendent and sublime love, Euydice sings Nick Cave’s “Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for?” This is a weak moment in the piece and a missed opportunity. The lyrics are quite feeble in the context of Bailey’s writing, and the tune has a dreadful commercial stage musical quality to it. It falls out of the production. Zweni has a sweet voice, but this is an Idols’ moment.
They fall asleep. Orfeus has one of those horrific dreams in which one is paralysed and can’t wake up. He dreams of the snake – played by the magnificently built dancer Michael Alfonso Dias, who creeps onto the stage naked except for his underwear. He bites Euydice, rapes her paralysed body, tongue flicking grotesquely, and carries her off to the underworld. The choreography here is effective, but it feels like a set piece, too conventional for Bailey. Why exactly Orfeus is unable to prevent it is not explained, it is fate, destiny intervening. Alice pleads with him not to wake up, not to reach out for his love, and find that the dream was real.
Discovering her gone, Orfeus loses his will to sing. The dull, menacing, drone of the background track in the opening moments returns. More than in any previous production, Bailey focuses on sound more than music. Together with sound engineer James Webb, they have created a soundscape installation. Speakers are buried in the grass, buzzing as we walk. As we follow Alice and the Frog to the gates of Hades and continue to walk from scene to scene, there are humming noises, sinister electronic whirring and rushing static.
We climb a steep embankment, past white crucifixes and open coffins lying in the bushes, towards the gates of Hades, decorated with African Zionist motifs. The Frog unlocks the doors, which open on squealing metal hinges, to reveal a line of long satin robes on hangers. He parts them and we enter Hell through the cupboard.
The underworld stretches out below us. There is a revolting stench of burnt meat. Bailey engages all the senses – in previous productions burning herbs. I recall once in Grahamstown, the fumes caught the throat of an ill-disposed critic driving him from the auditorium. Night has fallen now, and we can make out a series of dimly spot lit installations in the crater below.
We follow Alice and the Frog down the steep slopes and come first to the Forgotten Man, the only white actor in the cast. He is elderly, emaciated, dressed in a loincloth, sitting amongst a field scattered with large empty tins, their labels peeled off.
Orfeus appears, and sings his haunting, plaintive refrain, “Eurydice! Eurydice….!” A refrain that perseverates in our thoughts long after the play is finished. The Frog translates his song, and the reply – “Forgotten Man, have you seen my wife?” But the Forgotten man has been in Pluto’s realm for so long, he no longer knows anything.
Next is Bailey’s most awesome installation. A barbed wire encampment, a sort of laogai, with an electric fence, buzzing threateningly. On a primary red coloured floor, like a giant flag, a number of figures are seated, chains around their necks, fastened to a metal pole supporting a loudspeaker and a security spotlight. Blaring out is the voice of Hitler, in constant repetition, a few distorted phrases from one of his rabid speeches. When we first entered Hades, it sounded like a dog or the hounds of hell barking in the distance. The figures are covered with grey blankets, laboriously sewing soles on a pile of cheap shoes. When Orfeus arrives and pleads with them, they drop their blankets. We see now that they are all children, aged ten to twelve. Neither can they help Orfeus.
The next installation is one of the most chilling – the Gutted Man. Lying upside down on ‘the hill of atrocities’, he has rusted bolts sticking out of his eyes. He is strapped down to a mound of car and truck tyres, and has been disembowelled, his white and red intestines snaking out across the black rubber, a red light glowing from within. His body is spasmodically convulsed by electric shocks. Orfeus receives the same unhelpful answer. Desperate, he continues.
Now we arrive in the den of the lord of the underworld, the self-same King. He sits, whisky in hand, ominously scrutinising figures on a black and white computer monitor – an image of the utter calculating indifference of greed. Around him is the all too familiar detritus of corruption in the developing world – used syringes litter the floor, electronic goods, medical supplies and loot are piled about him, boxes of United Nations baby aid ripped open, some have dead bodies lying in them.
We learn that the guardian ancestors have perished. There is no one looking over the earth. The afterlife itself has been defrauded.
Orfeus arrives and pleads with the King, calling for Euydice. None will come to him, the King scoffs, for “I popped their eardrums. All of them!” Orfeus seems about to give up, exhausted, crying, he collapses, despairingly singing again his sad refrain, “Eurydice…” But one figure starts to move, with a white mosquito net veil over her face, she slowly crawls towards him. It is Euydice and they are reunited. The King relents – tells him to take her away, but not to look back or he will loose her forever. Alice tells him to trust that Euydice is behind him.
“How strong is your faith?” Alice asks us directly.
As we follow in the wake of the fleeing Orfeus, we pass the gutted man, now crazed and moaning a song, the children shoemakers dancing serenely, the forgotten man singing feebly. If you dare to look back, you see the long line of the audience’s flashlights snaking across the crater. Then you pass back through wardrobe.
We return to the stage under the trees. We have come full circle. But Orfeus has looked back, he has lost Euydice and with it the power to save. The King kills the baboon creatures one by one with his staff. It is done simply, symbolically, almost in slow motion. The King laughs, evil triumphant.
Alice covers Orfeus with the white cloak, tells us how they tore him to pieces with a song on their lips, scattered his limbs and threw his head in the lake where it can still be seen, glowing – like the reflection of the sun.
“Let’s go home,” the Frog announces, and in silence we walk back. No clapping. No bows. The conventions of theatre shattered. Bailey will not allow his piece to be bracketed, and nullified. When you reach your car, after following his ghostly folkloric creature in silence for ten minutes, it is as if you have dreamt the whole evening. Bailey’s eclectic design and visually arresting compositions have the originality, precision and power of our subconscious.
The sacred ibises that left their roost when Bailey started production, I notice have already begun to return to the clump of trees.
