This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

15th August 2009

It is a truism that the arts – and in particular the visual or ‘fine’ arts – cannot thrive without patronage.

The celebrated painting, weaving and pottery of medieval China flourished under the Tang, Ming and Qing emperors. Likewise (despite their many faults) we have the Medici dynasty and a few popes to thank for the Italian renaissance artworks of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and others.

Artists have always depended on either public or private capital to support and promote their work, from the tomb-obsessed pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the guilty philanthropy of the Guggenheims in America. There is often a taint attached to government- and corporate-funded works, an expectation that the artist will endorse a particular ideology or brand; but great art has the capacity to outlast such considerations and to rise above its murky origins.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

18th July 2009

Actors who put on one-man and one-woman shows at this year’s National Arts Festival variously described the experience as “exhausting”, “risky”, “gratifying”, “challenging” and “terrifying”.

Interacting physically, verbally and psychologically with other performers requires no less skill, energy or acuity than ‘going solo’. Nevertheless, holding an audience’s attention when alone onstage is a particularly daunting test of an actor’s ability.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

11th July 2009

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Among the many idiotic things that Springbok coach Pieter De Villiers has said recently, perhaps the least appropriate is his comparison of rugby and dancing as “contact sports” – for while the Boks’ series victory over the Lions was marred by dirty play, there is no such taint attached to South African dance and physical theatre. Certainly, if the productions that have by turns delighted, confounded and affected audiences at the National Arts Festival are anything to go by, we can be unequivocally proud of our dancers.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

11th July 2009

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If you’re a denizen of Grahamstown, or from the Eastern Cape, or were once a student at Rhodes University, this historic varsity town is a cosy and familiar place. Standing on Gunfire Hill (the site of the 1820 Settler Monument Building) and looking down over the small city, which can be taken in with a brief sweep of the eyes, you wouldn’t think it’s easy to get lost here.

Yet each year, the National Arts Festival brings thousands of culture vultures from around South Africa – and, indeed, the globe – to Grahamstown in search of the arts, bohemian living, late-night partying and general invigoration in the cold mid-winter; and, whether you’re a hardened Jo’burger, a Capetonian sophistiqué or an inhabitant of any big metropole, you’re guaranteed to become disorientated at some point. If the throngs of colourful festival-goers, the thousands of posters competing for your attention, the street vendors and the temptations of numerous restaurants and pubs don’t confuse you, the plethora of performance and exhibition venues will.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

27th June 2009

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Cartoons and cartoonists have been much in the news (and in the courtroom) recently. But, as numbers are bandied about – two lawsuits, seven million rand and so on – there is one figure that should not be forgotten: fifty. That’s how many years South Africans have known and loved “Jojo”.

This affable character was created by Len Sak in 1959 and appeared first in Drum magazine, then the World newspaper and subsequently the Post and the Sowetan. In the 1980s, Jojo had his own TV show on SABC 2 and, in celebration of Jojo’s half-century, a selection of the images produced for this series now form the basis of an exhibition currently on display at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

13th June 2009

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The art in portrait painting, Reshada Crouse reflects, is neither to flatter nor to insult: “I try to find a synergy between my subjects’ visions of themselves and what I see in them”.  This perhaps explains why Crouse’s collection of portraits is so eclectic – each subject demands a different approach. A range of materials and styles (not to mention poses and settings) is evident in her work, making it difficult to characterise.

She could be classified as a ‘portraitist’, yet Crouse resists such categories because they can limit the way in which an artist is viewed: “Calling a painting ‘a portrait’ has a favourable effect on the way the sitter is perceived (we have ‘portraits’ of important people, ‘pictures’ of ordinary citizens). But it can demean the artist. Frida Kahlo, Lucien Freud ... although there are many renowned painters whose output consists almost entirely of portraits and self-portraits, you wouldn’t label an exhibition of their work ‘portraiture’.”

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

22nd May 2009

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The annual Wits Arts and Literature Experience (WALE) has come and gone, but one of the festival’s key elements is still on display. “Capital: How Heads Talk” is an exhibition showcasing a number of items from the university’s collection of contemporary and historical African art, on the site of what will be the new Wits Art Museum.

The collection – which has been ‘hidden’ over the last few years during the search for funding and an appropriate gallery space – is a substantial one and the current exhibition features some celebrated South African artists: William Kentridge, Gerard Sekoto, Walter Battiss, Sam Nhlengethwa, Penny Siopis, Robert Hodgins, Brett Murray, Pieter Hugo and Cyril Coetzee, to name a few.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

16th May 2009

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The two exhibitions currently on display at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg are characterised by substantially different approaches to both form and medium. While the small sculptures in Edoardo Villa’s “Moving Voices” evince a preoccupation with primary colours and basic shapes, “Past/Present” – a selection from Andrew Verster’s work over the last two decades – presents the latter artist’s fascination with complex patterns and rich textures.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

7th May 2009

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When Nadia Davids’s play At Her Feet was first performed in 2002, “Western” perceptions of Islam were in a parlous state.

George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” in the aftermath of September 11th depended on an implicit stereotyping of Muslims as religious fundamentalists. News stories of young women becoming victims of “honour killings”, from the Middle East to Nigeria, seemed to confirm this equation. Images of burkha-clad women were invoked to demonstrate restrictions on civil rights under Sharia law, while in France and other secular countries there were protests over the right Muslim women claimed to follow hijab by wearing a scarf.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

7th May 2009

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The year was 1975. Rod McKuen – singer, songwriter, poet – was at the height of his fame. Sales of his books hadn’t yet hit the 65-million mark (a figure that would make him, officially, “the most widely read poet of his time”); nevertheless, his popularity as a performer was such that he had been playing to sold-out concert halls on both sides of the Atlantic for over a decade.

Yet McKuen, known for his social activism, came to South Africa at a time when the cultural boycott was firmly entrenched. So the first question on my mind when I have the chance to interview McKuen in advance of his return to this country some 35 years later is: why?

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

2nd May 2009

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Opera Africa’s Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu premiered in 2002, during a period in which (according to conventional wisdom on ethnic tensions within the ANC) Zulu people were politically disempowered in a Xhosa-dominated ruling party. At the same time, the IFP complained that Zulus were being sidelined even though they constituted a linguistic and cultural majority in South Africa.

Mzilikazi Khumalo’s composition – the first full opera in the language – was one manifestation of a resurgent Zulu nationalism. The late Princess Magogo (she died in 1984) was, after all, Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s mother; the uniting of the Buthelezi and Usuthu clans symbolised in the IFP leader’s name is the climactic historical event in the opera’s narrative. After debuting in Durban, Princess Magogo toured to Chicago, Amsterdam and Oslo.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

2nd May 2009

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South Africa-India relations have a high profile at the moment. The IPL (Indian Premier League) circus is dominating our cricket stadiums and our sports headlines. The Indian Deputy High Commissioner to SA, Vikas Swarup, is also a celebrated writer whose novel Q&A was adapted into Oscar-winning sensation Slumdog Millionaire.

These phenomena also demonstrate what is perhaps the most telling similarity between the two countries: we both have a staggeringly unequal distribution of wealth. SA may have a higher Gini Coefficient (the measure of the rich-poor divide) but comparing the Bollywood-and-businessmen razzmatazz of the IPL to the poverty-stricken lives of most cricket supporters in India offers a startling parallel to the difference between, say, Camps Bay and Khayalitsha.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

21st March 2009

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Mbongeni Ngema’s legacy is undoubtedly tainted by the Sarafina II debacle, the ‘reverse racism’ of his anti-Indian song “AmaNdiya” and, more recently, the controversy over the Mpumalanga provincial government’s plan to commission him to produce a R22-million musical about Gert Sibanda’s 1949 potato boycott.

Yet that legacy – which includes Woza Albert and Sarafina – remains a substantial one; none can deny that the outspoken Ngema is a significant figure in South African theatre, music and, indirectly, film history.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

14th March 2009

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Earlier this month, after Evita Bezuidenhout’s Jacob Zuma doll splashed water on members of the press from its Zapiro-style showerhead within minutes of ANC spokesperson Jesse Duarte leaving the room – and after photographs of South Africa’s most famous woman posing with her new companion appeared in various newspapers following the launch of Evita’s People’s Party – Pieter-Dirk Uys received a complaint from the ANC.

“They called it disappointing, offensive,” he tells me. “So I sent an email to them pointing out that a candidate for the presidency of South Africa, who should protect the constitution and the right to free speech, is in no position to sue a cartoonist! I want to say to Zuma, ‘You’ve got it wrong, my friend, you can’t sit on the moral high-ground’.”

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

14th March 2009

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The last time Fiona Ramsay and Robert Whitehead were on stage together, Ramsay tells me with a wink, I probably wasn’t even born yet. I’m quick to reassure her that when Michael Frayn’s play Benefactors arrived in South Africa a few years after it opened in London in 1984, I was very much alive and kicking. But her point is well made: although they have collaborated on various projects and have directed one another, it’s been many years since they actually performed together.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

28th February 2009

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It’s tempting to give The Fat Black Women Sing a glib tag such as “an urban Zulu Vagina Monologues” or “the Sex in the City of Jozi” – for, like these metropolitan precursors, the show celebrates the female body while reclaiming and affirming its sexuality. To do so, however, would be to neglect its African diasporic and local South African inflections.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

28th February 2009

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Towards the end of 2007, when “Polokwane” was on everyone’s lips, South Africans – both inside and outside the ANC – found themselves presented with a choice: Mbeki or Zuma? The ways in which that apparent dichotomy has affected subsequent developments in local politics are manifold.

But, judging by Crocodile Tears, artist Brett Murray is one of many who reject both these post-apartheid strongmen. Or, to put it another way, Murray suggests that (nuances of character and ideology notwithstanding) there is little fundamental difference between an SA under Mbeki and an SA under Zuma.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

21st February 2009

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JUST KEEP BREATHING: South African Birth Stories

Compiled and edited by Sandra Dodson and Rosamund Haden

(Jacana)

Some people plan their parenting very carefully; some have parenthood thrust unexpectedly upon them. Some battle for years to conceive; some find that they cannot have children. Others choose not to become parents, either to protect their lifestyle or based on a conviction that the earth is over-populated already. Yet the biological urge to procreate and nurture will not go away, and sooner or later everyone reflects on what it means to bring a life into the world.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

21st February 2009

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One of the consequences of the mythologizing of Afrikaner history by the apartheid government – and its wholesale rejection in post-apartheid revisionist histories – is that some of the nuances and complexities of life in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century South Africa have been forgotten. This applies to artists as much as to other public figures; and so it is that, arguably, Anton van Wouw is to be found “on the wrong side” of history.

This article first appeared in the programme for the Baxter Theatre/RSC production of The Tempest

January-February 2009

John Kani first encountered the work of William Shakespeare through B.B. Mdledle’s Xhosa translation of Julius Caesar, which he read and performed as a high school set work in 1959. At the time, however, he didn’t know it was by Shakespeare; some years later, coming across the original playtext, the young Kani thought it was an inferior rendering: “When I read the ‘English version’ of Julius Caesar, I felt that Shakespeare had failed to capture the beauty of Mdledle’s writing!” he chuckles.

This is one of thousands of South African stories representing the convoluted implications of Shakespeare’s presence in a “postcolonial” society. The difference is, of course, that Kani is one of South Africa’s best-known actors; his formative experiences of Shakespeare are tied to his development as a performer. This becomes clear to anyone who hears Kani, having described the impression Shakespeare indirectly made on him fifty years ago, relay some of the lines from Mdledle’s translation – demonstrating the matching cadences of the Xhosa and the English in iambic pentameter, and explaining the nuances of Mdledle’s word choices.