This article first appeared in The FINANCIAL MAIL

19th August 2010

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At a function during Chilean activist-author Ariel Dorfman’s recent visit to South Africa, ageing doyenne of South African letters Nadine Gordimer suggested that since 1994 the country’s theatre practitioners have been able to “tackle the present” more effectively than our writers.

What this comment – if it is valid – implies about South African literature remains a moot point, but there are few who would contest the assertion that the post-apartheid era has produced some wonderful plays “tackling the present”. Since the World Cup, however, there has been a bit of a lull; after the usual glut of new pieces at the National Arts Festival two months ago, there’s now a temporary dearth of original material on South Africa’s stages.

This article first appeared in The FINANCIAL MAIL

29th July 2010

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Unfortunately, people tend to be more impressed by demonstrations of seeming brute strength than they are by subtlety or nuance or complexity; likewise, superficial style is typically preferred to actual substance. In South Africa we evince a particularly acute form of these collective human traits – witness our country’s common practice of deferring to “the big man”.

It’s the reason that our political preferences hinge around personalities rather than principles or institutions. It’s the reason that we were lured into the mystique of Bakkies “the enforcer” Botha, and are only now coming round to the fact that the man represents a form of rugby akin to adolescent bullying. It’s the reason that we have bought wholesale into the global cult of celebrity, only to find VIP planes clogging our airstrips and VIP convoys displacing “ordinary” citizens from the roads.

This article first appeared in The FINANCIAL MAIL

16th July 2010

I’m not much of a crier. Usually, the most I can do is to choke up a little bit, perhaps with a vague prickling sensation behind my eyes. But when I went to Grahamstown, the tears came.

It was day three of my visit – an annual pilgrimage I make to the home of the National Arts Festival, which remains South Africa’s biggest platform for theatre, music, visual art, dance, craft and just about any other form of “arts and culture” you could care to name.

This article first appeared in The FINANCIAL MAIL

1st July 2010

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Can disco, with all its garish excesses and camp ironies, be a spiritual experience? What about the techno of the late eighties and early nineties, or twenty-first century house, or kwaito, or any of the other musical styles found in nightclubs? These are questions that audiences (to use the term loosely) will find themselves asking while enjoying Brett Bailey’s The House of the Holy Afro – and, by the end of the evening, they are likely to answer with an unambiguous “yes”. 

The show, which has been touring on and off overseas for some years, has a run in Johannesburg that is coterminous with the duration of the World Cup. It could in some ways be seen as the Market Theatre’s “official” offering for both South Africans and international visitors when their attention is turned temporarily away from matters on the football field (it’s a late-night gig and so does not compete with any of the evening games). 

This article first appeared in www.mediaclubsouthafrica.com

23rd June 2010

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Acclaimed theatre-maker and director Brett Bailey has “no interest in sport”, he tells me, and while the 2010 FIFA World Cup is underway in South Africa he will be in the Himalayas “taking a well-earned break” – his “first holiday in many years”.

Nonetheless, it is no small coincidence that the Market Theatre is hosting his latest show, The House of the Holy Afro, from 11 June to 11 July: the month stretching from kick-off to the final whistle of the football competition. The Market, like most arts institutions across the country, wants to use the World Cup as an opportunity to showcase South Africa and Africa’s artistic talent to the many thousands of visitors from overseas (and, in addition, to attract local audiences who are looking for something more than soccer). 

This article first appeared in The FINANCIAL MAIL

11th June 2010

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Almost every arts and culture institution in South Africa, hoping to capitalise on the FIFA road show, has some kind of “World Cup offering” during June and July. To its credit, however, the Joburg Theatre is not one of the many who have been hanging around in the goalmouth waiting for an opportunistic score. To extend the footballing metaphor, one might suggest that Joburg Theatre CEO (manager/coach?) Bernard Jay and his team have been implementing a long-term strategy; they bring integrity, careful planning and no small amount of skillful execution to their participation in the event.

This article first appeared in The FINANCIAL MAIL

28th May 2010

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It is no exaggeration to state that William Kentridge is currently the most highly regarded South African artist. He has worked with various forms and media, from film and animation to charcoal drawings, printmaking and sculpture. A Lecoq-trained actor and mime (although he has always denied any talent as a performer), Kentridge has worked over the years as both designer and director in various stage productions – from puppetry to, most recently, opera.

His production of Mozart’s Magic Flute received worldwide acclaim before wowing local audiences in 2007. Kentridge’s latest operatic endeavour, an adaptation of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera The Nose, premiered in New York in March. It is a mark of his protracted creative engagement with the subject matter that as early as 2008 Kentridge put together an exhibition of film fragments documenting the process of researching, workshopping and recording visual material relating to The Nose. The curiously-titled “I am not me, the horse is not mine” was first screened at the Iziko South African National Gallery and has now come to the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG).

This article first appeared in www.mediaclubsouthafrica.com

6th May 2010

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Conventional wisdom has it that you have to be in the right mood when you go to the theatre to watch a farce. If you’re grumpy, or angry, or tired, or stressed – or terribly serious for whatever reason – then slapstick comedy, mistaken identities, bawdy puns and caricatured characters are likely to get on your nerves.

The counter-argument, of course, is that it’s precisely when you’re feeling low that you need a medicinal dose of silliness: laughter for laughter’s sake has beneficial side-effects. If that’s the case, then it would make sense that farce on the South African stage is a popular phenomenon.

This article first appeared in The FINANCIAL MAIL

29th April 2010

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Nik Rabinowitz would seem to defy stereotype. He consciously promotes himself as a Xhosa-speaking Jewish boy whose upbringing straddled the disparate worlds of wealthy suburb and rural farm (in ‘Plumstead West’, also known as Constantia in Cape Town). Implicit in this self-mocking description, however, is an acknowledgement that in some ways he cannot help but conform to type: the white kid with the privileged background – he went to a Waldorf primary school, after all – trying to find a new identity for himself in post-apartheid South Africa.

As with most stand-up comics, of course, his humour relies heavily on the stereotypical assumptions of his audience: the Jewish kugel, the fat black ‘mama’, the Afrikaans dunce. But, like the best comedians, every now and then he turns these prejudices on their heads.

This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

25th April 2010

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A few minutes before the auditorium lights dimmed for the opening night of Opera Africa’s La Bohème, a colleague and I had been discussing the parlous state of arts funding in South Africa.

Of course, it’s an old saw within the arts community that our theatre practitioners, musicians, dancers, writers and other artists don’t get the financial support they deserve. But in this 2010 FIFA World Cup year, in which million-rand sponsorship and investment sums are bandied around on a daily basis, the neglect of the arts seems all the more acute.

This article first appeared in The FINANCIAL MAIL

16th April 2010

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Never let it be said that there is a lack of variety on local stages. Within a few days, this reviewer has been both thrilled by the pulsating rhythms of Stomp (at Montecasino’s Teatro) and invigorated by the political and personal dynamics depicted in Death of a Colonialist (at the Market Theatre).

It’s tempting to suggest that these two performance spaces, either side of town, reflect the twin moods in what we are constantly told is our polarised – or is it simply bipolar? – nation. On the one hand, there is the feel-good internationalism of Stomp, matching the highly anticipated global spectacle of the FIFA 2010 Word Cup. On the other hand, there is the more sombre terrain covered by Death of a Colonialist, which would seem to suit the gloom felt by many in a ‘re-racialising’ South Africa.

This article first appeared in www.mediaclubsouthafrica.com

18th February 2010

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For better or worse, South African history over the last 120 years has been closely tied to the country’s mineral wealth – and, more specifically, to the extraction of that wealth by a combination of entrepreneurial energy and worker exploitation.

The mining industry has produced images that have become iconic: the hard-hatted miner operating by torchlight, the lift carrying workers thousands of meters underground, the gleaming gold bars that emerge from a furnace. Yet each of these is an ambiguous symbol, suggesting both a proud heritage of engineering feats and economic growth, and a shameful history linked to race- and class-based oppression.

The visual arts offer one way of exploring such ambiguities, as recent and current exhibitions by two South African artists demonstrate.

This article first appeared in THE SOUTH AFRICAN ART TIMES

December 2009/January 2010

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In 2009, a year during which South Africa acquired a new president, a bulky new cabinet and a raft of new policy documents that may or may not remedy an old set of socio-economic problems, art exhibitions in Johannesburg reflected continuity rather than change.

There was, of course, plenty of work by artists following the injunction to “make it new”; but there was also a curatorial tendency to look backwards, to recuperate or consolidate aspects of the country’s twentieth-century artistic legacy. For this reviewer, certainly, the year began and ended in retrospection.

This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

13th December 2009

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If I had a time machine, two people I’d want to put in the same room are Malcolm Terrey and Erasmus of Rotterdam. I think they’d have a lot to talk about.

Erasmus – a theologian and scholar, the most prominent Dutchman of the European Renaissance – is best known for his work, In Praise of Folly; Terrey, on the other hand, is associated with folly on stage (not only in the long running Jo’burg Follies series, but in farces, travesties, revues and light-hearted romps of all kinds).

This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

6th December 2009

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Usually I hate it when people try to scare me with tales of haunted houses and evil spirits. I’d like to claim that this is because – as an ardent rationalist – I refuse to buy into ghost stories. There’s already plenty to be scared about in our day-to-day lives (crime, reckless driving and the mortal consequences of government incompetence) without having recourse to supernatural terrors.

Yet, if I’m honest, my dislike actually stems from the fact that I’m easily frightened. When listening to macabre camp fire stories or watching B-grade horror movies, I get the willies like a little boy, crawl into a ball on my chair and cling to my wife’s arm with clammy hands.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

7th November 2009

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Nowadays, we tend to take synthesis for granted. While racial and cultural conflicts persist, post-apartheid South Africa has seen a gradual dissolving of binaries such as ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘African’ and ‘western’. For a long time, however, these were fixed categories; those who successfully negotiated them were few and far between.

There was a particular generation of white English-speaking South Africans to whom this presented an acute dilemma. Born into an already-segregated nation in the early decades of the twentieth century, they joined the ‘mother country’ Britain and her allies in fighting a war against fascism, only to see the entrenchment of fascist principles in South African law in the years following 1948.

This article first appeared in WITS REVIEW

Volume 10 (October 2009)

Literati are inclined to pronounce, after watching a movie based on a novel or non-fiction work they have read, “The book was better than the film.” Of course, comparisons between genres are odious – and, moreover, the facile assumption that printed texts are more complex than visual or aural ‘texts’ is an inadequate formulation in societies where images and sounds have primacy over the written word.

There is, nevertheless, an obvious but important sense in which written text comes prior to an actor’s performance, to a camera recording and even to post-production tricks: almost all feature films have their origins in a script, or screenplay.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

17th October 2009

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Wilma Cruise didn’t want to be a mentor. When Teresa Lizamore, owner and curator of Artspace, invited her to participate in the gallery’s mentorship programme, Cruise was adamant: “I said to Teresa, ‘I don’t want to teach skills, to nursemaid anybody or to struggle with fundamentals’.”

Fortunately for Cruise, the young artist she was paired with, Louis Olivier, didn’t need to be taught. Instead, she found herself taken aback by “the array of Louis’ sculptural and painting skills. It’s a thing of beauty to watch him cutting, grinding and manipulating material. He has an instinctive understanding of ‘how things work’.”

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

26th September 2009

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Walter Benjamin famously insisted that the age of mechanical reproduction, in which works of art can be reproduced and widely distributed, has removed the “aura” of authenticity that is associated with original and unique artworks – a sacred association dating back to their use in religious and spiritual practices. As a result, Benjamin argued, art can no longer be based on ritual but must be firmly entrenched in the realm of politics.

Visitors to “Painted Narratives from India: Preserving History Through the Art of Story-Telling” might well expect to have this trend reinforced, if not because of the relentless politicisation of South African art (which we bring to bear on artworks from elsewhere in the world), then because it would seem safe to assume that the items on display must be reproductions. How, after all, can the murals of grand temple complexes and musty caves be displayed halfway across the world – except through pale imitation?

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

19th September 2009

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Braam Kruger was a man of many parts: artist, restaurateur, TV personality, writer, general dissident and latter-day Lothario.

He applied great energy to the art of living and was well-known for his skill as a raconteur, his peremptory comments about many of his fellow artists, his curious dress sense and other quirks – such that his personality (or the persona he cultivated) often overshadowed his substantial artistic output. After his death last year, friends and former colleagues decided to rectify this imbalance by putting together a retrospective exhibition.