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Festival gets stronger international flavour
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March 31, 2009
By Compiled by Adrienne Sichel
Local is indeed very lekker, yet again, but this year's main festival has a stronger-than-usual international presence.
At the top of the list is the Flemish Representation/ Belgium Embassy which bankrolled the Writing beyond the Fringe initiative as well as donating R680 000 for development projects at the Festival.
The official explanation for this official participation is: "As a prelude to the 2010 influx of visitors to South Africa, the governments of France, India, Ireland, Philippines, Spain, Belgium and the US have made it possible for their artists to join the party.
"The international flavour is enhanced by a number of visitors on the Fringe."
So expect to see Spain's hair artists Osadia in their outrageous outdoor salon and Ireland's Gare St Lazare Players staging Samuel Beckett's novella First Love and Music of the Philippines.
Centre Stage
There's plenty of fresh action from established names this year. Mike van Graan sashays off the Fringe to premiere Iago's Last Dance, a triptych probing HIV/Aids issues.
Veteran playwright Fatima Dike makes her Main Festival bow with The Return, directed for Artscape by Roy Sargeant. Set in Langa, this confrontation between a South African exile returning home with an African-American wife stars another theatre icon, Nomhle Nkonyeni.
Fresco Theatre fans will be cheering about Helen Iskander's The Famished Road, inspired by Ben Okri's magical book of the same name. Hoping to make her mark with her commission The Olive Tree, the Standard Bank Young Artist Award drama winner Ntshieng Mokgoro uses "story, image, poetry and song to tell a tale of rebirth in a tapestry of ritual and culture".
Not only will Durban's KickStart theatre company be staging Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning one-woman play Wit, starring Claire Mortimer, the playwright will be in attendance, thanks to the US Embassy.
Another visitor, from the UK this time, is Something Dark, featuring poet Lemn Sissay (directed by John McGrath) in an autobiographical monologue about being in foster and state care then travelling to Gambia to find his mother.
Nigel Vermaas premieres his Do you know Billie Holliday? - a peek into the jazz singer's relationship with her prison warder.
Although on the Fringe the inaugural Writing beyond the Fringe comprises public readings of new plays, to be digitally recorded by four SA writers, led by overall winner Phillippa Yaa de Villiers.
Her autobiographical The Day that Jesus dropped the Ball and other Stories won her a writing residency at the Passaporta Festival in Brussels last week. The other winners are: Grahamstown's Brink Scholtz - Passing; Cape Town's Kurt Egelhof - Band on the Run; and Joburg's James Cairns - Ossewa.
Reaching Out
The Festival's ARTreach programme will take certain productions to local prisons, hospitals and children's homes.
Hands On! Masks Off! continues with its series of professional workshops.
The Remix Laboratory, funded by the Belgians, kicks off a 10-day residency involving Flemish theatre professionals. Sixty-five artists from five provinces will be mentored, will critique each other's work and attend workshops.
The selected participants are: Soweto's Ipelegeng Community Centre; Thaba 'Nchu's Mmabana Cultural Centre; Durban's BAT Centre; Cape Town's Nyanga Arts Development Centre; and an Eastern Cape group.
In another developmental strategy Grahamstown residents have been trained as stilt-walkers and storytellers.
See the full programme at www.nationalarts festival.co.za from tomorrow.
Moving It
Performance poet Lebo Mashile resumes her contemporary dance persona in Threads, her collaboration with veteran Joburg dancemaker Sylvia Magogo Glasser.
PJ Sabbagha returns to his alma mater of Rhodes University with his Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative in tandem with Ivan Estegneev's Dialogue Dance, from Kostroma, Russia. For the all-male Zebra, Daniel Mashita, Ivan Teme and Songezo Mcilizeli join their two Russian counterparts Estegneev and Sergey Kremnev in a completed version of a FNB Dance Umbrella 09 commission which was also performed in Moscow and Kostroma last week.
Jay Pather's deeply interrogational installation work Body of Evidence (a 2008 Dance Umbrella commission) showcases Durban's edgy Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre. Expect to hear the traditional ravanne drums in Mâ Ravan by Theatre Taliipot from Réunion Island, which introduced its memorable The Water Carriers, in Grahamstown some years back.
Still in traditional mode is the East Cape Ensemble, which goes indigenous and India's Sruti Bandopadhay and performers who show off Manipuri folk dance.
The ballet brigade should be delighted with Cape Town City Ballet, backed by The Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, in Paquita and La Sylphide.
Out and About
Apart from the surreal Spanish coiffure crowd, the streets will be alive with uBaba and uMama and their three kids from Orange Farm's irresistible South African Great Ubuntu Recycled Universal's giant African Puppet Family (pictured above).
This work grew out of an Arts Alive project with France's Les Grandes Personnes last year.
Listed under exhibitions Cape Town's master provocateur Brett Bailey goes site specific again in "three unconventional sites" with Blood Diamonds.
Art Attack
Nicholas Hlobo's Young Artist Award exhibition Umtshotsho is a multi-media exploration of partying with a purpose.
His fellow art laureates over the past 25 years, who include William Kentridge, are profiled in a retrospective exhibition curated by Wits University's Professor Alan Crump and the Standard Bank Art Gallery's Barbara Freemantle.
Also of special interest is Construct: Beyond the Documentary Photograph, curated by Heidi Erdmann and co-curated by Jacob Lebeko, which highlights works by Roger Ballen, Zander Blom, Lien Botha, Jacques Coetzer, Abrie Fourie, Nomusa Makhubu, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Barbara Wildenboer, Dale Yudelman and Bernie Searle.
Music And All That Jazz
The Cape Philharmonic Orchestra under the batons of Allan Stephenson and Bernhard Mueller will be very busy with ballet and concerts.
London-based Young Artist Award winning baritone Jacques Imbrailo appears at the Sunday afternoon concert singing opera favourites. Schumann's Dichterliebe is at the heart of Jacques Imbrailo in Concert with Waldo Weyer (piano).
The centenary of the birth of SA composer Michael Mosoeu Moerane is celebrated in Moerane Tribute by The Voice of Cape Town Choir accompanied by a double-bass quartet, directed by Lungile Jacobs.
Opera gets another look in with 2008 Young Artist Zanne Stapelberg, who joins forces with guitar maestro James Grace for Canciones en Españolas.
The ever-popular Freshlyground pop up in the Standard Bank Jazz Festival.
For his Young Artist commission, Cape Town drummer Kesivan Naidoo presents two concerts: Kesivan & the Lights incorporates his mentors from home and abroad and Babu is fuelled by his sojourn in India on a Samro scholarship.
Eastern Cape Focus
Brink Scholtz and Ayanda Nondlwana direct The Road to Success which follows a young pantsula dancer's journey from the platteland to the big city.
This is one of four local productions presented in The Studio.
The music programme offers Songs of the AmaGcaleka - performed by a troupe of singers, dancers and musicians who celebrate Xhosa traditions.
The Eastern Cape Art and Craft Exhibition shows work in a wide variety of media from rural and urban areas.
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