This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

19th September 2009

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They’re odd creatures, teenagers; or, rather, they have an odd effect. Adult patrons at theatres, concert halls and other terribly sophisticated arts venues feel anxious shivers down their spines when a group of adolescents walk in – an anxiety confirmed by loud whispers during the overture and aggravated by sporadic giggles.

Every now and again, however, the tables are turned and adults find themselves in the minority. This happened to me at the Joburg Theatre last week, when I attended a matinee performance of the SA Ballet Theatre’s Giselle staged primarily for school pupils – an event forming part of Johannesburg’s Arts Alive Festival. In that context, a strange alchemy occurred: I heard in the whispers an enthusiastic engagement with the production (“Who is she?”; “What’s that one doing?”; “Look at his costume!”), while the giggles were signs of delight at the spectacle onstage and bemusement at the unwritten codes that dictate when it is appropriate to applaud. 

Experiencing this collapse of the generation gap, or gaps – for there were a few audiences members who were twice my age – I was tempted to moralise about the arts’ capacity to overcome the barriers that separate us. I wanted to agree with the late Guy Butler, who affirmed the potential of performing artists to make their audience members feel at least “partially submerged in a sense of community”.

South African society, however, is so fraught with social divisions that such optimistic sentiments seem facile. Generational differences are the least of our worries: what about race, wealth, language, gender, ‘culture’? Can our artists fuse these fault lines? Should they be expected to do so?

Yes and no – that’s according to Steven Sack, director of Arts, Culture and Heritage for Johannesburg and thus one of the prime movers behind Arts Alive, which is on throughout the month of September. “In an important sense,” he comments, “the arts generally (and festivals such as Arts Alive specifically) do change people’s lives. When you engage with art, you reveal your personality in new and different ways through callousness or empathy towards what you see. Art’s ‘core job’ is transformation of consciousness. Moreover, as I think Dickens wrote, those living in conditions of poverty have a greater need for art because they have to use their imaginations to overcome material privations. This is especially applicable in SA.”

Having said all of which, Sack insists that “Art’s primary goal is not instrumental. Its ‘purpose’ is to engage the senses, to create something joyous, something that challenges. With the Arts Alive Festival we’re trying to be everything to everyone but, ultimately, what we promote is simply a bunch of people making art – which nobody needs in purely utilitarian terms. People do need it, however, in terms of stimulation, reflection, celebration – the real stuff of life.”

The scope of the Festival is, indeed, wide enough to be “everything to everyone”. There are music concerts ranging from classical to jazz to hip-hop, poetry readings, stand-up comedy evenings, dance performances across genres, art and craft exhibitions, film screenings and numerous workshops in various disciplines.

There are also ‘sub-festivals’ that fit under the Arts Alive umbrella (each requiring “different marketing” to appeal to “niche audiences”, Sack notes). The 969 Festival, hosted by Wits University, provides a platform for shows that ran at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown earlier this year to be performed for up-country audiences. The Soweto Festival, the Hillbrow Peace Festival and the Fietas Festival (each taking place over the final weekend in September) will be consciously community-oriented affairs.

Arts Alive is also shaped by distinct international presences. Shared History: The Indian Experience in South Africa, billed as “a confluence of art, music, dance, food, literature, film and the spiritual diversity of India”, is a R3 million exercise in ‘soft diplomacy’ aimed at strengthening ties between the two countries through a public-private partnership. The Thailand Grand Festival and the Netherlands Mayday Explore Project (a reminder that the Dutch also have a ‘street’ culture of break-dancing, MCs and graffiti) complete the global flavour.

But what about Africa? SA’s relationship with the continent north of the Limpopo remains an ill-defined one. The artists performing at Arts Alive include visitors from Senegal, Gabon, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Niger, Namibia, Madagascar and Mozambique – but their participation, Sack admits, has largely been funded by the French and German governments. “South Africans are not that keen on paying for artists from other African countries,” he explains, referring to difficulties previously experienced when trying to bring out artists for events such as Africa Day.

The SA-Africa dynamic will be one of the central concerns addressed at two key meetings that coincide with the Arts Alive Festival. Next week sees the Fourth World Summit on Arts and Culture hosted at Museum Africa by the National Arts Council (on behalf of IFACCA, the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies) and, just prior to this, the second biennial conference of the Arterial Network at the Goethe Institute.

The Summit will bring together about 400 delegates from 70 countries. “This is an opportunity for the whole African arts sector to benefit – SA has won another major world event on the back of ‘benefits to Africa’, but we must use the Conference and Summit as launching pads for future projects. Also, it’s a chance for South Africans to pay more attention to African artists living in our country,” says playwright and arts administrator Mike van Graan, who is programme director of the Summit and also part of the Task Team that has been driving the Arterial Network’s activities since their last conference in 2007.

To hear Van Graan speak about the Network and its partnership with the recently-established African Arts Institute (AFAI – sponsored by Spier through the Cape Town-based Africa Centre) is to be persuaded that the prospects for growth in the “African creative sector” are strong. He envisions self-sustained, income-generating, trans-continental projects that will reinforce the economic significance of the arts industry.

There are many who argue that handouts, bailouts and other forms of aid to Africa are in fact hampering development on the continent. While he does not comment on this broader issue, Van Graan longs for African arts enterprises that do not start with “begging from the North” or “a mindset of victimhood”. The AFAI has commissioned research into the fiscal impact of the arts, confident that this will demonstrate how – far from being a ‘drain’ on resources – artists can in fact contribute appreciably to a nation’s GDP.

Governments of many African countries have recognised the revenue potential of the tourist dollar; the Arterial Network and the AFAI have an advocacy strategy that concentrates on arts tourism specifically. Moreover, apart from increasing state investment in the arts (with fair expectations of solid returns), the aim is to make transnational funds available to arts entrepreneurs from across Africa, thus decreasing dependence on ‘Western’ donors.

This is not driven by a sense of ingratitude – a glance at the funding partners of the Arterial Network reveals Dutch, Norwegian, Belgian and Danish backers, along with the European Commission – but by a recognition that donors’ capacities to provide capital fluctuate (particularly during times of recession) and that the greater African arts ‘community’ cannot and should not rely on them.

Van Graan is aware of likely pitfalls and cautious about the trap of idealism: “There are various innate problems. Who will have access to the funds? Another challenge is to avoid the collapse observed elsewhere, such as with the SADC Culture Trust Fund. In the past, we’ve been great at producing documents but bad at implementing them.”

The AFAI and Arterial Network have already begun with implementation – for instance, building a pan-African database of arts practitioners and setting up a website that will act as an information portal, facilitating the interaction of Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone Africa. The Institute also runs workshops for arts journalists and provides training for arts entrepreneurs.

With his other ‘hat’ on (as director of the World Summit), Van Graan has been stirring the pot with a series of weekly emailed provocations or “Views on the Summit”. It is often taken as a truism that SA is a microcosm of international disputes based on ethnicity, wealth and power imbalances – and that there are global lessons to be learned from our local experience of racial reconciliation. But such self-congratulation, Van Graan warns, ignores ongoing racial tensions and widespread bigotry. 

Further topics for discussion include the establishment of an annual African Capital of Culture; the effect of UNESCO policies on culture-based development models; and the difficulty of balancing integration in heterogeneous societies with the protection of cultural diversity (which can also result in ‘ghettoisation’).

In this regard, Sack anticipates “Some controversy, some name calling. As soon as you introduce a discourse around cultural identity, there are people who want to protect their turf – to claim ownership over culture – by claiming the sole right to ‘use’ heritage and tradition, making accusations of cultural theft.”

Van Graan warns: “We don’t want initiatives like the AFAI to become embroiled in SA’s cultural and racial politics. Visiting other African countries, seeing how their artists operate, may shift our consciousness. There are examples in Africa that we can learn from.” And, as Sack indicates, there will be much discussion at the Conference and the Summit about “trying to facilitate greater movement of artists across the continent.”

This is a necessary counterbalance to the arrogance of ‘SA-centrism’ and its corollary, xenophobia. Nevertheless, Sack reiterates that “the use of SA resources for the rest of Africa” is likely to be a point of conflict as “it plays into xenophobic neuroses that ignore the reality of porous borders.” Van Graan concurs: “Our country has an increased responsibility because it has the strongest economy on the continent. It is generally those with disposable income who support the arts (in other words, who provide a livelihood for artists). Resisting that responsibility contradicts SADC agreements.”

Either way, Johannesburg will remain a vital site of experimentation, collaboration and income generation for artists from across Africa. Arts Alive is the city’s biggest festival, but as a showcase it should also act as a springtime reminder to Joburgers of the theatre, music, dance, literature and visual art happenings that take place during the other eleven months of the year.

So far, Sack is happy with a “world class” Arts Alive 2009: “Attendance has been good, so we know that we haven’t yet reached the point of over-supply. In planning for the future, we’re aware that we must take risks and introduce people to new things. We can’t be too conventional; after all, we have to keep growing the audience. There is huge competition for consumers’ leisure time and money – so you have to find products that people want and get the pricing right. We’ll also continue to subsidise tickets and put on free concerts.”

Unfortunately, it remains true that paying audiences are often demographically distinct from those attending arts occasions that are free to the public. This would probably be borne out by a comparison between those watching the opening event of Arts Alive – a concert by “Dorothy Masuku and Friends” on Mary Fitzgerald Square in Newtown – and those enjoying a similar line-up of musicians at the Joburg Theatre at the end of the month.

Likewise, while there was a ‘mixed’ audience at the matinee performance of Giselle I attended, a striking separation of black and white, rich and poor was evident in the auditorium: in one section sat underprivileged children from Alexandra who are part of SABT’s ballet outreach programme; in another sat a group from a private Afrikaans girls’ school. They certainly didn’t interact in the foyer outside either.

But at least a mutual arts interest brought them into the same room, focussing their attention on the same dancers. Perhaps, after all, they were transformed (however briefly) into what Butler called “a psychological crowd” whose members “look into a doubtful future” even as “their sense of sharing a common life preserves their unity.”

We can only hope so.