National Arts Festival, Grahamstown 2007, Part Five

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This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

14th July 2007

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Falling in love with the foreign 

Mike van Graan’s latest satire, Mirror Mirror (brought to the National Arts Festival by Geoffrey Hyland and the students of UCT’s Drama School), hints rather sardonically that there is far too much in post-apartheid South Africa that simply ‘mirrors’ the conditions of apartheid. As the title suggests, the play also emphasises the role of the artist in ‘holding the mirror up to’ contemporary society, reflecting critically on what he or she sees. Yet Van Graan has chosen to place his mock-epic in a “Wizard of Id-type land” with royals, nobles and peasants – a decidedly European setting for an obviously African play. 

The choice is an interesting one because it has in common with many other shows performed in Grahamstown this year what might be called an ‘outward-looking’ approach: a sense that artists need not focus solely on local interests and that, even if matters South African form their main concern, they can still take aim at ‘home’ subjects through ‘foreign’ lenses.

There is a deeper trend underlying this phenomenon. South Africans have been wont to criticise ‘Eurocentrism’, but what is usually intended here is actually an opposition to ‘Anglocentrism’ – eschewing the British imperial urge that, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries at least, dominated the colonial experience in this country. It is a vague criticism but, insofar as it is similar to a general disliking for ‘the West’, it is pitched at a perceived globalising trans-Atlantic alliance (not helped by Tony Blair’s support for George Bush) between the UK and the USA. The anti-American sentiments in the South African artistic community are perhaps evident in the fact that – apart from ‘Africanised’ derivations of American youth culture – there were almost no pieces by American playwrights at the festival. The obvious exception, of course, is Edward Albee: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf played to packed houses, and the lesser-known The Zoo Story featured on the fringe; but then Albee’s dramas are deeply critical of post-war America.

Recent antagonism between European nations and both Britain and the US have, however, had the curious effect of distancing ‘the continent’ from ‘the West’ in the South African mindset. Moreover, given the long history of association between South Africa’s socialist struggle and the (admittedly failed) experiment of communism in Eastern Europe, there is a sense in which ‘European’ need no longer be used pejoratively in this country.

All of which frees South Africa’s artists and audiences to look north of the Mediterranean for inspiration. This does not simply mean renditions of European classics (such as the sold-out performances of The Nutcracker and Haydn’s oratorio The Creation) or adaptations of seminal texts, such as Nicol Ramsauer’s portrayal of Kafka’s A Report to the Academy. It also means collaborations between European and South African theatre practitioners, such as that between Belgian Gaetan Schmid and Cape Town-based Rob Murray in producing The Dog’s Bollocks. Schmid plays an eccentric professor with an accent of uncertain European provenance, who teaches his South African audience about the idiosyncracies of the English language worldwide at the same time as poking fun at the oddities of our own varied English idiolects.

Murray himself appears in the groundbreaking Gumbo (which combines the acting talents of both deaf and hearing actors) as an unidentifiable but undoubtedly European character from a dark gothic tradition. His confusing accent and stumbling speech patterns are, of course, appropriate to a theatre enterprise that foregrounds the communication barrier – in this case, not simply between different languages, but the more profound separation of sound and silence.

Scott Sparrow locates his bravura one-man Performer’s Travel Guide in the coastal village of Kurtankall (or ‘curtain call’, to elaborate on the meta-theatrical subtext), which is somewhere in Eastern Europe – although it has a multinational population ranging from a cockney Englishman to a Japanese sushi chef and is occasionally visited by a flamboyant Spanish musician, the hilariously melodramatic Manuel. Nevertheless, the central character in the story is the Slavic-sounding Ivan Popczieski, a tragicomic portrait of a would-be artist as a camp young man whose death leaves his grieving mother forever fishing for the blue whale that swallowed him. The pathos (and bathos) of this image owes much to our sense of the suffering patiently endured in that part of the world throughout the twentieth century. Other plays invoked this pity to different effect, such as Jutro (the title is Polish for ‘tomorrow’), in which a World War Two bomb blast leaves the singer and the barman of a Warsaw cabaret club trapped together.

Ultimately, however, it would not be accurate to characterise the 2007 festival’s engagement with foreignness as predominantly European in flavour. There were performances that left audiences looking ‘further east’ than Poland, such as the Kuchipudi Dance Group’s programme of traditional Indian dance and song. Even more interesting were the musical stylings of East Meets West, a group that combines the venerable Indian instruments of sitar, sarod (an ornate banjo) and tabla (a polyphonic drum) with the cello and the saxophone to produce a unique syncretic sound.

There were also engagements with the ‘south-west’ – that is, Central and South America. Tickets for performances by Mexico’s Delfos Dance Company were a more precious commodity than the gloves, scarves and beanies cherished by every freezing ‘festino’. Brazil also made its way into the programme, albeit on the last day. The ‘SpiritFest’ initiative, centring on Grahamstown’s grand old cathedral and aiming to explore the relationship between the arts and religious faith through drama, music and a series of lectures, culminated in Richard Cock’s Songs of Praise with some of Grahamstown’s school choirs. The programme included both ‘European’ and ‘African’ hymns, but the most memorable piece was undoubtedly Andrew Tracey’s arrangement of the hypnotic rhythms and harmonies of the Brazilian tune “Lemanjá”, set to traditional African instruments along with strings and brass.
 
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