This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

6th December 2008

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Visitors to the latest exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Disturbance: Contemporary Art from Scandinavia and South Africa, might well find themselves wondering what brought these works together. What, after all, could artists from Scandinavia and SA have in common?

As co-curator Clive Kellner suggests, however, this is not a particularly useful approach. “Yes, you could say that these works all deal with questions of identity, with the emotions; that they are cerebral, or about sensation – but any artist can comment on that. Instead, you could take a global perspective and say that there is a young generation of artists who are interested not only in what is common but, equally, in what is not common between the peoples of different countries worldwide.”

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

6th December 2008

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When I first heard about The Von Memertys: A Celebration, I’ll admit I was a little dubious.

Renowned piano player and song-and-dance man Ian von Memerty has previously teamed up with his dancer wife Viv to great effect: everyone enjoys watching a dancing duo knowing that the partners share real-life romance as well as onstage chemistry. But throw their two children, Oscar and Kasvie, into the mix – a singing, dancing “family Von Memerty” – and, well ... doesn’t that just make for self-indulgent, sentimental schlock?

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

29th November 2008

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South Africans in the twenty-first century have an ambiguous relationship with the “Bushmen” or San people (an ambiguity foregrounded by our uncertainty over what to call them). On the one hand we are complicit in their demise, insofar as our forebears, black and white alike, were guilty of subjugating, enslaving and ultimately exterminating them. Paradoxically, on the other hand, they have left us a cultural legacy that – fragmentary though it may be – is arguably the only heritage shared by all South Africans.

Our poets have been captivated by the mythology and mystery of their oral narratives; our environmentalists have lauded their ecologically-minded relationship with the land’s flora and fauna; our anthropologists, linguists and historians have tried to trace the ways in which they were assimilated into or interacted with other ethnic groups; and, crucially, our artists have responded to the enduring ability of their rock paintings and engravings to captivate viewers.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

15th November 2008

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Two art exhibitions running in Johannesburg during November explicitly comment on (and, both deliberately and by chance, subtly hint at) the ways in which South Africans of different stripes interact with each other yet manage simultaneously to lead utterly separate lives.

At the Everard Read Gallery in Rosebank, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Louis Jansen van Vuuren’s “Two Un/Related Stories” is a collaboration that spans continents, cultures, races and artistic media. The premise sounds simple enough: SA-based Mthethwa sends France-based Jansen van Vuuren a series of photographs, which Jansen van Vuuren then reformulates into mixed media images.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

8th November 2008

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Despite the work of playwrights such as Ronnie Govender (The Lahnee’s Pleasure; At The Edge) and the success of Geraldine Naidoo and Matthew Ribnick’s The Chilli Boy, it’s probably fair to say that there is a paucity of widely-known theatre productions about the experiences of Indian people in South Africa. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that this lack of recognition indicates the status of Indian South Africans as a “forgotten minority” in what is perceived as the “popular culture” of this country and in international assessments of our society.

Rajesh Gopie’s Out of Bounds is a play that has already gone some way towards rectifying this problem – and the show, directed by Tina Johnson, has returned home for a three-week run in Johannesburg after touring in the UK, Europe and America.

This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

2nd November 2008

2008 has been a celebratory year for Moving Into Dance Mophatong (MIDM), which – since it was founded by Sylvia ‘Magogo’ Glasser in 1978 – has survived and, indeed, prospered against all the odds: first as a non-racial training organisation and dance company under apartheid, and then continuing its good work despite the dearth of arts funding in post-apartheid South Africa. The company has performed to great acclaim at numerous events in this, its thirtieth year; it was recently recognised with an Arts and Culture Trust Award for Cultural Development; and it will soon be moving to specially-built premises in Newtown.

The official anniversary, at the end of October, was marked by the much-anticipated launch of Threads, a collaboration between Glasser and Lebo Mashile that promised to be “a verbal dance or a physical poem”, aspiring “to seamlessly merge dance and poetry”; and by Gregory Maqoma’s Ek sê ... Hola!

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

2nd November 2008

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Every time comedians like David Newton walk on stage, Antonio Gramsci turns a little in his grave.

Gramsci, the Italian philosopher and political theorist, was a Marxist who used the word “subaltern” to describe members of the exploited lower classes; the term was subsequently adopted by critics such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak to describe all those who are oppressed, marginalised or shunned by mainstream (typically Western) society because of race, culture, gender, religion and other grounds.

What do Gramsci et al have to do with Newton’s stand-up comedy? The answer is that Newton has a special relationship with subalterns: he considers them particularly worthy of mockery. In fact, he argues, by making fun of them, he is actually challenging their status as outsiders; political correctness, according to Newton, is a form of discrimination – it excludes certain individuals and groups of people from the common life of laughter.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

26th October 2008

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Rudyard Kipling was simultaneously one of the British Empire’s most vocal critics and one of its most convincing apologists.

Of all the Englishmen who lived in the Indian subcontinent under the Raj, Kipling (who also spent time in and wrote about South Africa) probably understood India best; and, before “indigenous” Indian writing in English became recognised as a vital strand in global literary culture, it was Kipling who vividly presented the people and landscapes of India to the rest of the world. Yet he remains a controversial figure, accused by many postcolonial critics of jingoism, militarism and bigotry.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

18th October 2008

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If you’re one of those people for whom the words “Beauty and the Beast” conjure up a schmaltzy ballad by Peabo Bryson and Celine Dion – or perhaps, with the 1991 Disney film in mind, an ageing Angela Lansbury setting aside her septuagenarian sleuthing in Murder, She Wrote to provide the voice for a singing teapot – then you’re likely to dismiss a stage version of the musical.

This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

28th September 2008

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During times of political uncertainty or potentially momentous (and potentially unsettling) change, we rarely look to our artists for comment. This seems a pity, as it reflects the unexalted stature of the arts in our country, and indeed worldwide – but in at least one way it is appropriate. Ars longa est, as they say: “art is long”. Yet a week in politics is a lifetime. Indeed, most works of art – on stage, between book covers, in galleries – that do engage directly with ephemeral political events have a comparatively short life span. What art can do, however, is address those human dilemmas and emotions that outlast all our most important current affairs.

Such a work of art is Coupé, a piece of theatre set in an instantly recognisable South African reality but tackling what might, hesitantly, be called “universal” concerns. After being enthusiastically received when it was first performed some two years ago, Coupé has been reprised and re-worked by director Sue Pam-Grant and her cast, and will run at the Market Theatre until the 26th of October.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

13th September 2008

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When characterising this country’s two major cities, most South Africans follow a handful of largely unchallenged assumptions: Johannesburg represents the new, the hyper-urban, the frenzy of commerce; Cape Town stands for “tradition” (or at least, established collective habits), for a laid-back approach to life, for natural beauty.

It’s intriguing, then, that new exhibitions at some of the major art galleries in these cities invert such associations. At Johannesburg’s Everard Read Gallery, British artist John Caple’s “To The Quiet Moon” both invokes and evokes a rural – one might even say “rustic” – idiom. On the other hand, there is “Print ’08: Myth, Memory and Archive” at the Bell-Roberts Gallery, which has relocated from the Cape Town city bowl to Fairweather House in the gritty suburb of Woodstock. Like “Monomania”, which was recently hosted by the Goodman Gallery Cape (neighbour to the Bell-Roberts), “Print ’08” is strongly tied to the material concerns of a modern metropolis.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

6th September 2008

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I first saw Africa Umoja – the Spirit of Togetherness back in 2002 when, as one of thousands of home-sick ‘Saffers’ living in London, I relished the taste of a production that seemed to be so quintessentially South African. Umoja offers audiences a whistle-stop tour from the days of the kraal (animal skins, beadwork and all) to the rhythms of kwaito, taking in a range of iconic sights and sounds along the way. There is the sangoma, the Venda snake dance and Zulu stick-fighting; there is the music that grew from early encounters between black migrant workers and the ‘white’ metropolis; there is jive, jazz, marabi, gumboot dancing, mbaqanga, gospel, the marimba and ikwassa kwassa. The scenes unfold in locales with resonant names – the Durban YMCA, Sophiatown, the mines, Soweto and the ubiquitous shebeen.

This article first appeared in THE MAIL & GUARDIAN

5th September 2008

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The Beijing Olympics may be over, but interest in China is unlikely to wane any time soon. In South Africa, one minor manifestation of this global trend is the development of a sub-sub-genre in local literature. Admittedly, two books do not a pattern make; but following Robert Berold’s Meanwhile Don’t Push and Squeeze, about a South African writer who goes to teach English in China, we now have Alex Smith’s Drinking from the Dragon’s Well, about – you guessed it – a South African writer who goes to teach English in China.

This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

24th August 2008

If, like me, you barely know your pas de basque from your pas de cheval or your entrechats from your échappés sautés, a trip to the ballet can be a little intimidating. Will you notice the minute details of poise and movement that (to the better informed) so clearly elevate the principal dancers above the corps de ballet? Will you follow – and believe – the twists and turns of the storyline? Will you have the stamina to keep applauding through all those curtain calls?

Fortunately, however, the pageantry, spectacle and high drama of top-quality ballet can be enjoyed by cognoscenti and philistines alike; and this is precisely what the South African Ballet Theatre (SABT) provides in La Traviata – The Ballet, which runs at the Civic Theatre until 7th September.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

16th August 2008

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Back in the 1990s, when the world was young and the cast of Friends still had big hair, there was an episode of the hit sitcom in which Chandler explained that Michael Flatley “scares the bejesus out of him” because Flatley’s legs “flail about as if independent from his body!”

Admittedly, Friends is not the ultimate barometer of popular culture, but the allusion does indicate the impact that Flatley’s Lord of the Dance had when it first appeared on the international scene. Having debuted in Dublin in 1996, the show was a hit in the USA and rapidly became Irish dancing’s global flagship – superseding the Riverdance company that Flatley had helped to form but left after ‘creative disagreements’ with his co-creators.

This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

Sunday 10th August 2008

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I’m running a few minutes late for my meeting with little-known South African theatre personality, Ron van Wuren – and with each passing minute, I know, the number of people milling around the theatre foyer-cum-coffee shop is growing. But I’m not worried. Although he’s shorter than most, Ron stands out in the crowd; and when I arrive, I recognise him straight away. It’s been about ten years since he made his first (and only) appearance on stage, but fortunately Ron bares a striking resemblance to a far more prominent figure of the local stage and screen: Rob van Vuuren.

For those who weren’t at last month’s National Arts Festival, this coincidence requires some explanation. Van Vuuren was involved in no fewer than 13 productions in Grahamstown, one of which was the intriguingly titled Rob van Vuuren is Ron van Wuren. Audiences who knew about the former flocked to find out about the latter – was he a new alter-ego, like Twakkie from cult slapstick phenomenon The Most Amazing Show?

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

Saturday 9th August 2008

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Herman Charles Bosman won’t go away. He may be less popular with certain politically correct educationists who can’t detect the irony in his use of the ‘k-word’, but he remains one of the greatest writers South Africa has produced.

Those who acknowledge his literary talent do so mostly by invoking his Groot Marico stories. Indeed, precisely because they were prescribed for so long on high school and university curricula – and because of Patrick Mynhardt’s vivid stage impersonation of Oom Schalk Lourens, the bumbling narrator of so many of those stories – the Bosman we have inherited is the Bosman of Mafeking Road and A Bekkersdal Marathon, of the ‘stoep’ and the ‘voorkamer’, of the pipe and the peach brandy.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

26th July 2008

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Ten Bush, a new play by Mcendisi Shabangu and Craig Higginson, opens with a nervous declaration from a clearly disturbed woman (Martha, played by Tinah Mnumzana): “Every day, I try not to look backwards ...”

The effect of obsessing about the past – whether trying to avoid it or remaining bound by it – is the central theme in this work. What does it mean to “look backwards”? In one sense, it seems to refer to the psychological enslavement brought about by superstitious fears. Martha is visited by the ghost of Chief Malaza who, according to a centuries-old legend, betrayed nine Swazi chiefs at war with the Sotho. The village of Tenbosch (in present-day Mpumalanga) was, according to this narrative, founded on their graves; and, consequently, the inhabitants of the fictionalised Ten Bush have been cursed in each ensuing generation.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

19th July 2008

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The dichotomy between page and stage may be a false one, but it is a common enough assumption (albeit unconscious) that the literary text implies a reader-writer dynamic, while the theatrical production depends on an actor-audience relationship, and never the twain shall meet.

The ancient Greeks – as with so many other things – had it right: they used the same word, poet, to describe Homer and Euripides, Orpheus and Aeschylus. Of course, the irony here is that legendary or mythical figures like Homer and Orpheus were poets in the oral tradition, while playwrights like Euripides and Aeschylus committed their dramatic creations to paper (many of which were lost in the fires that destroyed the great library of Alexandria).

This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

6th July 2008

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Very few people who attend the annual National Arts Festival in Grahamstown know that this country’s flagship cultural event has its roots in a comparatively modest festival of Shakespeare productions and lectures held in 1974, linked to a conference on “English-speaking South Africa” and not as far removed as the organisers had perhaps hoped from the jingoism and colonial cringing that was still strongly associated with ‘Englishness’ south of the Limpopo at that time.

Shakespearean criticism and performance has changed a lot since then, and over three decades there have been hundreds of different manifestations of Shakespeare’s plays at the Festival. 2008 is the first year that there is no ‘straight’ Shakespeare performance on in Grahamstown; but there are nevertheless three adaptations that offer rich pickings for bardolators and bardophobes alike.