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

Infecting the City February 13 – 20

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

February 13, 2010 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

Infecting the City 2009

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.

February 12, 2009 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

Foreign Perspectives on the National Arts Festival

As a nation, South Africa has long overcome local cultural cringe and the need to emulate Anglo-America for artistic validation. We do however still tend to look to overseas for accreditation. Not unlike the misunderstood and marginalised village artist who must seek city fame, local artists are notoriously ignored until they receive global praise. Accumulating foreign kudos to gain national recognition is of course not unique to us.

For the first time in its 52-year history, the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC), a body that embraces members from over sixty countries, was officially represented in South Africa at the National Arts Festival (NAF) in Grahamstown.

The invited critics were chosen from countries with which we have weak historical links. The idea was not to see how our performing arts measure up, but to gain fresh, diverse perspectives and hold creative discussions about the works at the festival and the role of theatre criticism.

During the course of a week in which the critics saw all the main festival dramas and a half dozen fringe performances, Yun-Cheol Kim, President of the IATC and professor of drama at the Korean National University of the Arts, found most of the shows to be simply staged, even naïve. He was moved by the integrity and sincerity of the performers. Violence, and especially the stark depictions of rape, was a disturbing theme.

Matti Linnavouri from the Finnish Critics Association too was struck by how many plays dealt in some way with young girls finding themselves forced to assume adult responsibilities. He observed that women theatre practitioners were concerned with social issues, while male directors were preoccupied with conceptual work.

Tiago Bartholomeu Costa, editor of Portugal’s Obscena performing arts magazine and a voting member for the European Union’s prize for New Theatrical Realities, said he’d had never seen so many political plays in such a concentrated space. He particularly praised black women performers, finding in them a depth of emotion and a strength of portrayal that is quite uncommon.
He noted how the experience of seeing a South African play with a South African audience was quite different.

Costa said that some of the best performances he has seen in the past year in Europe were South Africans such as Steven Cohen, Nelisiwe Xaba and Robyn Orlin. He had been hoping for more works of this calibre.

The only performances which the critics unanimously praised at this year’s festival were Ten Bush and Batracien, l’après-midi. There was however praise for John Allen and the First Physical Theatre Company’s Ozymandias.

The IATC had hoped to establish the first national section in Africa at this year’s festival.

July 14, 2008 | Tags: | Comments Closed

Ismael Mahomed new Executive Director for NAF

The National Arts Festival has been in the custodianship of Executive Director Lynette Marais for the past 20 years. She can retire now with peace of mind and her legacy intact. This landmark cultural event is in excellent shape. From a logistical point of view it is one of the most efficiently run festivals you’ll attend anywhere in the world. Besides the 500 odd shows starting on time, the festival is bigger than ever, financially secure and poised for greater things.

Her job is a daunting one. The festival is run by a skeleton staff that has to micromanage every detail while still balancing the big picture. Teamwork gets them through.

“You feel like an octopus and everybody is pulling one of your legs. And you know octopi have only got little brains,” laughs Marais as I interrupt her multi-tasking.

“I know what it is to stand on that stage and I know how the artist relies on having that support. The confidence that there is somebody there and they have you in the palm of their hand and they will get you through it.”

“I have always tried to make it as good, as easy and as pleasant for the artists.”

Marais is looking forward “to not have the stress I have carried for however many years. I will help my friends and do everything I can, but it will be a relief knowing I’m not carrying the can.”

Fortunately for all involved, the succession has been well managed by the board. Ismail Mahomed, who takes over the reins, is in the office with Marais for this year’s festival.

“Are we looking for change?” I ask Mahomed.
“I think change is inevitable by the very nature of the arts,” he replies. “The way we generate new kinds of audiences. We have to be at the pivot of making things happen. I think the expectation in the arts community is that with any kind of change in management there will be a change in direction.”

Mahomed is trying to encourage artists and stakeholders in the festival to be vocal and “kick our butts”.

“We as management need to go into meetings informed by the aspirations of the arts community so that we direct change to meet those changes. There has to be open and honest debate throughout the year engaging with management.”

The impression created by Mahomed and the newly appointed CEO Tony Lancaster, is that the festival is coming to be seen as a national resource for the artistic community of South Africa. This year sees the launch of the ‘Hands On! Masks Off!’ project, a programme of workshops, discussion forums, networking opportunities and seminars for artists run by the doyens of the industry.

“Its fine to say we need to develop new audiences, but as an arts community we must take responsibility for growing those audiences. The approach we are taking with this years festival is lets first skill the practitioners so that the practitioners can be partners with us in developing new audiences,” says Mahomed.

“The main festival has developed very strongly but I think we need to look at how we meet the challenges of the independent theatre sector which is what largely comes to the festival hoping that someone will see their work and take it further.”

Having participated in the festival in various capacities for 23 years, Mahomed feels “I have paid my dues”. His approach should reassure artists that the festival is still in good hands. He sees himself as “a passionate artists who wants to do things and a manager who has to give consideration to a whole range of logistics. I am somehow able to look at things through both lenses. I can empathise with artist as I have come the route the majority of artists have come.”

July 1, 2008 | Tags: | Comments Closed

Tony Lancaster appointed CEO of the NAF

Whereas many organisations are moved to introspection at a critical juncture – self-examination staving off an autopsy – the National Arts Festival (NAF) is a healthy, irrepressible outfit going on now for 34 years and in no imminent danger of losing centre stage. There is nothing on this continent close to it in terms of diversity, the number of arts events (532 this year), and the range of art forms presented. Attendance is satisfactory and sponsorship appears secure, together injecting over R50 million into the local economy. Yet the festival has embarked on some serious rethinking and a rejuvenating energy is detectable. You need only go to their useful new website at www.nationalartsfestival.co.za to see change is in the offing.
The Board, which carries overall responsibility for the direction of the Festival, has almost doubled in size since 2004. The Festival Committee, which determines what works are performed, is now chaired by Sibongile Khumalo who took over in 2007 after the time-honoured Mannie Manim stepped out. But the greatest focus of change is the creation of a CEO, installed in the enthusiastic personage of the very recently appointed Tony Lancaster.
Lancaster says the NAF wishes to be “the most polished, the leading arts brand which is more than staging a great festival for ten days…What we do for the artists and audiences and the arts in general must extend beyond”. The idea is that “everyone leaves with something that is useful to them…and are richer for it”. The Festival is even contemplating road-show workshops across the country.
Lancaster sees his challenge as “how to harness the legacy [of the Festival] and turn it into something that takes the Festival to the next level. I would not say there is a lot wrong with the Festival but there is plenty of scope for growth and scope for opportunity.” The motivation seems to be to do even better, an ambitious and proactive response to the ever-changing social and economic landscape of South Africa.
The Festival appears on track to do this. Government is at last a key stakeholder, with the Eastern Cape Province and the National Arts Council contributing substantial amounts. An educated guess (the figures are not public) places the combined contribution of various government agencies at over 50% of total sponsorship. South African business in general should be shamed by this.
With an operating budget of R16 million of which 60% is allocated to productions, the festival though not cash-strapped isn’t yet in a position to fulfil all its noble aspirations. Of Lancaster’s many first tasks then, growing audience numbers will probably be the most crucial. “I don’t think we can economically sustain more productions, but what we can sustain is bigger audience houses…My focus is getting more audiences in and making it more economically viable for the productions that do come here. There is obviously a link between those two.”
One innovation is funded by the Arts and Culture Trust with sponsorship earmarked to assist community theatre groups. Says Lancaster: “We are not just going to hand out cash, but we will do matching, so for every ticket you sell we will buy another ticket for someone else, which puts pressure on these groups to not just come and do shows for each other but to market themselves”. The festival plans to buy around 5000 tickets for local school, church and community groups.
Business Arts South Africa (BASA) has also stepped up to the plate. They are funding Cue, the Festival newspaper, to enlarge its daily Fringe coverage significantly. Better-informed festival-goers are more likely to book for productions on the sprawling and qualitatively uneven Fringe, which in Lancaster’s opinion “is very strong this year”.
In terms of the nature of the works on at the Festival, there is scope for something of a reversal in programming. Over the years, the Fringe has steadily lost its appeal for commercial producers. The risks are high and the financial rewards far from lucrative for the big names. The Main has therefore been about balancing reliable draw-cards and artistic quality, since these properties often conflict. But a robust Fringe that could support commercial work with broad appeal would allow the Main to concentrate on artistic merit first, satisfying its core constituencies of artists and patrons of the arts. This would bring the Festival more in line with European Festivals, where the emphasis is on the avant-garde and creating a highly subsidised and supportive space for the Continent’s leading artists to grow and develop.
The importance of the arts to the vitality and survival of a healthy national psyche, which can only be attained through the artistic vanguard, cannot presently be over emphasised.
The new CEO and his team are well positioned to do this and have great prospects ahead of them. New vision and new energy in such a major cultural institution will be a boon to the nation.

| Tags: | Comments Closed

Interviews National Arts Festival 2008

Saartjie Botha
One of Afrikaans theatre’s leading playwrights is the author of Untitled.
I understand the work is developing in rehearsal at present. Is this not a text-based work?
No, in essence it is a play about the failing of language, where we live in a country with eleven official languages and people don’t understand one another and they don’t have the ability to formulate in a third or a fourth language.
People struggle to express themselves not only from language constraints but also emotionally. Secondly, it is about fear and how it manifests in terms of language. On the third level, it is about the death of a woman in a crime situation.

Does the work speak to the xenophobic violence of recent?
It wasn’t conceived that way, but it’s interesting because suddenly there is this new thing that is forcing its way inside. It wasn’t intended, but this is an organic process.

Why has Afrikaans theatre retreated from Grahamstown?
It’s not financially viable. It’s the most expensive festival to attend from a production point of view. The fringe festival can’t compete with the main in terms of ticket prices. It’s a difficult festival if you’re not on the main programme. Also in terms of the Afrikaans festival calendar, the week before is the InniBos festival in Nelspruit [25 – 29 June] and then the week after it’s the Volksblad-Kunstefees in Bloemfotnein [8 – 13 July] which is a fantastic festival because you only perform in theatres.
However, for many Afrikaans [theatre practitioners] Grahamstown is still the festival to be. I like to attend it, but not partake.
But even in Cape Town, you don’t see a lot of Afrikaans theatre. It’s safer for producers to go to Stellenbosch, because they know they have an audience.
Festen was the only full-scale production in Afrikaans last year [in Cape Town]
I don’t know why it is happening that Afrikaans theatre is not part of mainstream theatre in South Africa anymore.

Chuma Sopotela
This young actress is now one of the Western Cape’s most sought after performers. Her “the foot has no nose”, an avant garde performance piece inspired by the deaths of five of her family members, caused a sensation at Spier Contemporary 2008. She won the Fleur du Cap Award for Best Actress this year. Sopotela will perform in Untitled at the festival.

Your work is wide ranging from character roles and physical theatre to performance art. Where do you see your future as an artist?
There is always a reason. In each project I discover something about myself. I want to work with as many directors as I can. Sometimes I do clowning work for kids, but it is all part of personal development. My ultimate goal is to go and teach so I’m gathering tools for teaching when I’m older and wiser.

You used to do performances for the Treatment Action Campaign. Is your work motivated by social issues and social concerns?
The works I have done have always been personal stories that are effected by the things that happen in my society. These are personal stories that resonates with other people. My life has been a guided journey.

I know the work is Untitled, but if you had to give the work a different title what would you call it?
Moments of stillness.

Neville Engelbrecht
K Sello Duiker’s novel The Quiet Violence of Dreams about a young black man’s tortured rite of passage and his life as a rent boy has been adapted for the stage. Engelbrecht directs.

Is black homosexuality still taboo?
Talking to the cast, yes, among their friends the reactions they’ve had, especially for the straight guys. Some have had quite heavy reactions. It is not as bad as it was, but still definitely a stigma. The cast are very brave, obviously around the intimate scenes.

What do you see as problematic specifically for black homosexuals?
It is still a cultural taboo. It is still not talked about. White colonials are still blamed for bringing what is almost seen as a disease to Africa. African maleness is very specific.

How did K. Sello Duiker cope?
From what I know, he would not have admitted to being gay. He himself was never open about it, but I see lots of Sello in the book. His bouts of depression for instance.

How do you find self-actualisation in prostitution?
The way I see it, it is a life journey into manhood. The kind of messed up broken people he meets along the way informs him. He has to go into that underbelly world in order to see. In the creative arts, we understand that drama draws on the suffering, and that is also how the self-actualisation for him happens.

Nadia Davids
After the spectacular success of he first play (At Her Feet) Davids latest work examines the life of activist Cissie Gool in the play Cissie.

Biographical plays are notoriously hard to pull off. They easily turn into lecture theatre or dramatized essays. What techniques have you employed to avid this?
A diversity of characters speak offering different insights. I have people who are dismissive of her [Cissie Gool] legacy alongside people who ‘pedestalize’ her. Of course the truth falls somewhere in between. I saw Waren Beatty’s Reds recently and that for me was an extraordinary piece. How to avoid eulogising and mythologizing people whilst still celebrating their greatness. The use of tiny snippets of people speaking.

What phrase comes to mind when you think of Cissie Gool? If you had to write an epitaph to her what would it be?
Courage. “She led a rich and autonomous life.” Someoen who creates unbelievable possibilities in her life

How did you come across Gool’s story?
She has been in my consciousness from an early age. She was a friend of my grandfathers. I had an incredible hitory teacher Gail Weldon who encouraged us to find sotries. The archives were silent on Cissie Gool. So I spent time in the Cape Town archives going through newspapers and started interviewing people.
She led an unchartered and different life but was still claimed by everybody.
In the end it is an imagined piece. This is my Cissie, its not going to be everybody else’s.

What is the significance of Gool’s life?
The play is about Cissie Gool but it is also about District Six and forced removals. I’m interested in issues of performance and memory and performance as an act of history. What is the way in which we can talk about exile? about forced migration? There’s a poem by Mahmoud Darwish where he writes “we are the country of words speak speak so we can know the end of this tale”. Its about how story can rebuild place and rebuild people.

Rehane Abrahams
Performer and theatre practitioner Rehane Abrahams plays the role of Cissie Gool in Cissie.

You are co-founder of the women performing artists collective The Mothertongue Project for healing and transformation through art. How does Cissie relate to your work?
It’s about holding your power as a woman. A lot of words about power are being bandied about, but people don’t realise how deep and meaningful that is, and what a journey you have to go through as a woman to feel you stand in your own power and it’s unshakeable. It’s not something that comes from an aggressive or a defensive place, but from a true place with a lot of integrity

There’s a line in the play that says “she lives inside her beliefs” not next to them. There wasn’t a single part of her life where she wasn’t committed to her life. She is representative of an incredibly bravery. She buried her father. I don’t think it has ever happened in Cape Town before or since. She refused to stay at home. She went to the graveyard and buried her father with 300 men. She said there was no Koranic injunction forbidding her to do so.

Why was her story lost for so long?
None of the activists of that time (1940s – 50s) came to the fore. The people who were trying to resist the government at the time especially in Cape Town
exist in private narratives and personal histories. I have a brilliant photograph of my grandmother from that time [1940s] striding through the streets of Johannesburg with a massive hammer and sickle on her arm and a stern look on her face. We always wondered what was that about.

Mncedisi Shabangu
A versatile director and a star performer, Shabangu is co-writer and director of a mysterious new play Ten Bush.
How did you come across this strange and wonderful story?
We were originally going to rework Theatre de Complicite’s The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol but then we changed. I was working with a community theatre group in Komatiepoort. They were doing a story that was irrelevant to me at the time so I asked them to tell me a story. They told me this story and said it came from a farm called Ten Bush and I loved that name. I dreamt this story of a place where my people come from and they need a leader.

Did you find the unmarked graves?
The place used to be full of animals but a certain chief’s son hunted until he actually destroyed all the animals. He started killing people and burying them in unmarked graves, until he committed suicide. When it rains, you can find bones in the morning. I can relate the problems of that area to that story.

Ten Bush broke my heart. It is in the middle of a huge sugar plantation. There is no electricity, no tarred roads, just donkey carts. There are millions of snakes. But the people survive. It is far removed from modern civilisation. With this work, I want to give attention to this place.

How is it to co-write a work?
It is always difficult yet interesting. I know the story and every day I retold it to Craig [Higginson]. We make discoveries in the process. I come from a place about 30 minutes from there. We went to Ten Bush and we sourced some of the stories in the place and interviewed people.

Craig Higginson
Author Craig Higginson’s latest work deals with an extraordinary tale from the Limpopo.
What is the story of Ten Bush?
In our version, Ten Bush was built on the graves of the nine Swazi chiefs who were betrayed by the tenth chief, Ngomane, during a battle with the Sothos hundreds of years ago. Since then, the area has been cursed with poverty and famine, and the first daughter from Ngomane’s line has been barren.

Martha, Ngomane’s heir, is tasked at the beginning of the play to lift the curse by sacrificing her unborn daughter to appease the departed ancestors who still haunt Ten Bush. But Martha is barren and so orders her sister to sleep with her husband instead – a decision that has consequences neither Martha nor any of the other inhabitants of Ten Bush could have foreseen…

How does co-writing work? What are your roles?
This is the first time I have co-written a play. Potentially, it’s a minefield. The fact is that I would never have written this play alone – it comes from a deeper place in Mncedisi than it does in me. Mncedisi, after all, is more or less from the area and culture described in the play. As a white, English-speaking person, I wouldn’t have had the presumption to write this play alone.

How does the story speak to us in the here and now?
What is interesting about the people we met around Ten Bush is that they are as much concerned with events that happened three hundred years ago as they are with contemporary politics – in fact, I would argue that some of them are even more so. The village of Ten Bush also looks exactly as it must have fifty years ago.

What does the festival do for you? What do you wish the festival would do?
My play Dream of the Dog was on the Main Festival last year, but that is the first time I have had a play on at the festival. Before that I was working in the theatre in the UK. I think it’s a great festival – really as good as many other arts festivals around the world. For me, it exposes our work to audiences who wouldn’t necessarily see it in our home towns – both nationally and internationally – and it means that interesting new tensions and conversations start up between the different plays. The fringe is still going strong and is genuinely diverse. I think the Main festival faces the same challenges that all other theatres and festivals do: diversity and transformation are always issues. But I would also like to assert that most of those involved in the theatre community are forward-thinking people who provide an example that other citizens in our land should follow. The Market Theatre is going through a very good period, and is, I believe, as much a place of integrity and good quality theatre as it ever was during apartheid.

Martin Koboekae
Martin Koboekae has written and is directing a play about the life of Stephen Bantu Biko.
The blurb in the programme gives the impression this play will deal with Biko in a new way.
People know a lot about his writings and his political comments but not about his relationships with his colleagues, his girlfriend, the social moments he shared with other people. I want people to understand his ideas but also to understand the man behind the icon, who obviously like everybody else has flaws. It is a social and political perspective on him.

What was your artistic ambition for this work?
Like every playwright I hope people respond well, even those vocal BCM opponents will understand that Biko never regarded himself as a politician. He was a community activist. I designed the play to bring forth the ideas he spoke for but also his human side.

It is a dangerous thing to take on an icon.
I am aware of the risk I am taking. I will have opposition, but I have artistic license. I am entertaining, educating and bringing forth the risks Biko took as a person and not forgetting his youthful indiscretions.

The title is enigmatic Biko: Where the Soul Resides. What do you mean by this?
When I coined this title, I was thinking of the BCM, where black people found where they could be accommodated with comfort, dignity, where the black identity should reside.

What do you feel about transformation at the festival?
Last year I took a conscious decision not to go. I have been going to the festival with productions since 1992 for 14 consecutive years. I was not happy with how things were panning out. Only black people associated with mainstream theatres are considered. I tried four times for the Main. This is the fifth time and now I have been accepted.
People do not understand the difficulties a black artist is faced with in this country when he wants to do a black themed production. A white playwright, a white director will go to the township and produce a very ritualistic play about black people and they will put it on the Main. But if a black playwright does this then he is said to be alienating white audiences. Black ritualistic plays are only accepted if driven by white people. Black theatre practitioners are not given enough chance. Their artistic merit and quality is questioned.

June 30, 2008 | Tags: , , , , , , , | Comments Closed

Out the Box Festival 2007

Much praise and congratulations need to be heaped on Janni Younge (director) and Aja Marneweck (artistic director) and their team for putting together this year’s festival of puppetry and visual performance.

Perhaps the most exciting performances recently in South Africa originate from a blurring of installation, visual and performance art, with theatre and dance. In its third year now and building on last year’s success, the Out The Box Festival has finally arrived as a vital force on our theatre landscape.

Diarize now for next year. (See web link in the left hand column).

Festival directors, Janni Younge and Aja Marneweck, aim ‘to provide emerging and established visual theatre artists with a platform to present their work alongside award-winning international practitioners’. There is no question that the FNB Dance umbrella is responsible for the virility and high standard of South African dance. Out the Box looks set to grow into something that does the same for cutting edge theatre.

The festival is divided in two. The provocative Adult Festival (at the Little Theatre complex) involves high quality performances, a mini-conference, talks, workshops and carnivalesque parades; all in a festive environment with food, refreshment and craft stalls. The parades were a bit anti-climactic and some thought needs to go into those.

Highlights this year included several international artists. The ritualistic Dutch Puppeteers, ‘T Magisch Theatertje (Panta Rhei II) produce exquisite work with delicate glove puppets unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.

I missed the Australian circus artist Beth MacMahon (Venom) and hope that next year there can be more performances of each artist rather than only two.

The Reunion Islands’ Theater Des Alberts (Accidents) was another treat. Extremely funny yet poignant this brilliantly conceived work enchanted everyone who saw it.

Standard Bank Young Artists Award winner Acty Tang’s controlled butoh style Protect was visually breathtaking. Nobody moves on stage quite the way he does.

The Iqonga/Platform provides emerging and professional artists with a space to showcase 10 short experimental pieces.

The Family Festival (at the Baxter) makes professional puppetry available to hundreds of learners during the week. The foyer of the Baxter is transformed into a market with face painting, magic, puppet sales, and many other activities for parents and children. The gallery hosted an exhibition of Indonesian puppets.

September 14, 2007 | Tags: | Comments Closed

South Africans at Edinburgh 2007

Comparisons are invidious, but instructive. An ex-South African (to use that colloquialism peculiar to white South Africa meaning a highly qualified fellow with two passports who now lives in London) tells me our National Arts Festival is no different from the Edinburgh festival. Make that festivals – half a dozen separate simultaneously held events. The Scottish capital – their host –– is architecturally splendid and multitudinous, beautiful but unsurprising, built as it is on the discreet greed of the financial instrument – banks and insurance companies forming the bedrock. Started in 1947, to affirm the creative achievements of the human spirit after the near annihilation of meaning during World War II, this year marks the 60th annual celebration of the arts.

The festival first-timer notices similarities to the Grahamstown event: the desperate fringe artists swatting patrons with flyers; the stone university buildings; makeshift venues that recall a Gothic student digs’ life; and a High Street with a dirty great cathedral (theirs is dirtier); the seething crowds – though in SA we don’t usually get teams of drunk, middle-aged women stumbling home. It’s also wet. The height of Scotland’s summer is equivalent to the depths of our winter. Robert Louis Stevenson described Edinburgh’s climate as “meteorological purgatory”. Global warming seems to have slowed the Gulf Stream denying the country any future summers, instead scorching tinder-dry Europe. And like Grahamstown, the city is teeming with an outbreak of comedians.

There is no comparison in scale. There are more stand-ups at Edinburgh than there are fringe shows at Grahamstown. Over 300 comics and over 600 comedies. Bring back King James VI for he licensed comedians (and beggars) in the 16th century. With 2000 fringe acts and over 17 000 performers, Edinburgh is seven times the size of our National Arts Festival (NAF). The only absence this year appears to be that of American patrons, so complain some impresarios.

The problem is partly that the ever-growing number of shows has outstripped the audience. Like our National Arts Festival, the open fringe has no curatorship. However, and this is a concept the Grahamstown event should seriously consider, two reliable brands of quality have been established on the open fringe – the Assembly and the Pleasance. The Assembly banner, consisting of eight separate venues scattered throughout the city, hosts over 300 shows, itself producing 25 shows, two of which so favoured are South African: Michael Lessac’s Truth in Translation and Brett Bailey’s House of the Holy Afro.

This year, Assembly founder and CEO, William Burdett-Coutts, anticipates his first financial loss in seven years, but he’s taking it in his considerable stride. It happens in this business; no need to panic.

Without a financial guarantee, it seems insane for a South African artist to even attempt Edinburgh. The economics are as foreboding as those of our NAF, except in British Pounds ten times the stake at risk. Even if sold out, the show is lucky to break even. Innumerable shows find themselves playing to audiences of fewer than twenty. Most British artists really come hoping to be discovered for television and radio. After a workshopped Jerry Springer the Opera was picked up by the National Theatre and went on to a spectacular West End run Edinburgh is awash this year with new musicals – over one hundred! There’s Orgasm the Musical, Zombie Prom, two musicals about Tony Blair, as well as several other facile agitprop pieces going by such jingles as Jihad the Musical and Failed States.

On the Royal Mile, I bump into Stef Junker (of Stef’s Sidesplitting Hypnosis) parading in the cold drizzle wearing nothing but an exiguous speedo. “We’ve decided to bring you some sunshine from sunny Souf Efrica,” he shouts, exaggerating his accent and pressing a flyer on me.

There seems to be a rite of passage, peculiar to South African performers, perhaps a hangover from cultural cringe, who feel that to stage at Edinburgh is to graduate after they have ‘passed’ Grahamstown. And there were many gold stars awarded this year. All the proudly South African productions – Lucy Heavens and Sarah Jane Scott’s Eurafrica, the Cape Dance Company, the Grammy-winning Soweto Gospel Choir’s African Spirit, as well as Translation and Afro received much coveted and judiciously awarded four-star reviews. While an exhibition of William Kentridge’s prints has introduced this master artist to a new audience.

The print critics, because of the bewildering number of shows, are powerful here, though more by way of their recommendations that bring an audience, than by their ability to put people off. However, one pities those shows listed in the daily review paper under ‘Not Recommended’– surely their titles should have sufficed – Beckett in a Bucket, Songs About Vaginas, and Find Me a Primitive Man?

The LA production of Athol Fugard’s Exits and Entrances is being favourably received too, though marred by the appalling apery of Fugard’s accent by the young man playing the autobiographical character. I preferred our Jason Ralph, but overall this production is superior because director Stephen Sachs understands that it is a struggle of styles. Morlan Higgins as André Huguenet, flamboyant not flaming, manages the crucial transition, to be stripped of disguise and affectation, not “an actor puffed up on stage”, but “an ageing fat old gay ham”, the real man bursting through his artifice.

Truth in Translation kicked off in the headlines with Hugh Masekela declaring to The Times that the ANC had sold out the struggle and he felt he was no longer welcome to trumpet transformation. He is quoted as saying, “People fight for freedom and then they forget and oppress their own people.” As if to prove his point the following week The Scotsman ran a 36-point headline: “A bully, thief and drunk who jumped the transplant queue to ‘steal’ liver – meet Dr Beetroot, health minister”, accompanied by a suitably frightful picture of Tshabalala-Msimang.

Critics seem to agree with this newspaper’s assessment that Translation is aesthetically and structurally flawed, but the subject matter transcends its formal detractions. Extracts from Lessac’s Translation will be performed at the Fringe Awards ceremony.

South African artists have certainly made good at Edinburgh this year following in the footsteps of a history of quality productions at the festival by stalwart theatre practitioners such as Andrew Buckland, Mbongeni Ngema, David Kramer, Greg Coetzee, Paul Slabolepszy, Pieter-Dirk Uys and Nicholas Ellenbogen.

August 30, 2007 | Tags: , | Comments Closed
« Older Entries