After yet another return journey along the Garden Route (including the obligatory lunch-by-the-sea/lagoon/actually-it's-an-estuary in Knysna), I am back from Grahamstown and the National Arts Festival of 2012. The festival isn't done until Sunday but it's done with me so here's my two cents worth. Unfortunately I didn't see half as many shows as I would have liked, I spent some of my time in the Eastern Cape in a hospital in Port Elizabeth visiting a friend. However, I did get a thing or two done...
1.
I got to perform at the festival for the first time in the UCT student production The Homeless Orchestra, directed by the lovely Joanna Evans. Check out a review of the show here (not so sure I said all the things attributed to me in the review, but anyway).
2.
I watched some great theatre including Nicola Hanekom in Hol.
3.
I drank a lot of whisky and had many pseudo-intellectual conversations about art and life and stuff.
4.
Maybe most importantly for someone in my current about-to-be line of work (oh woe is me, only a couple months left of the student life), I saw works by internationally-renowned South African heavyweights Brett Bailey and Steven Cohen for the first time in my young life. Whoop, right? I'm not so sure. Exhibit A, Bailey's installation-exhibition was initially commissioned in Europe for a European audience and so I was unaffected by it in many ways, because it wasn't targeted at me, but more about that later (see PERFORMANCE ART section below).
I've been a huge fan of (my experience of photographic documentation) of Cohen's work for quite a while. I must admit I quite surprised to discover that his performance art piece was taking place in the Rhodes Theatre (a traditional proscenium arch nogals). Cohen has disputed The Cradle of Humankind's classification as performance art by the festival programme, arguing in the Cue that it contemporary dance. And while I found the imagery that he and his 91-year old former nanny, Nomsa Dhlamini, evoked both beautiful and thought provoking, the piece moved at snail pace. It felt like a guided tour through an museum exhibition as it was set up. It could have been half the time i.e. everything could have been done at twice the speed and it would have been just as, if not more, effective. Hence the parentheses in my first sentence of this paragraph. I think, in my limited experience of it, I prefer Cohen's work in photographic form. The images alone can convey the concept, the performance isn't really necessary (a criticism I would lodge at Athi-Patra Ruga too).
That being said, I am extremely happy I got to see the performance. The projection and video work throughout the piece was beautiful and of a high qualityWe were allowed onstage afterwards to view the set and all the items were beautifully designed and executed. I was particularly excited to find flat-bottomed metal spheres on the floor that were locked with padlocks, the keys in the locks. What a treat! I would find something almost nobody else, maybe nobody else, watching the piece had seen before. Sadly the space inside was empty but it didn't matter. For me that is what performance art is all about, that feeling of being special, of having a unique interaction that no-one else can or has had. It was a rush to try and guess what the large, old book, written in French with a handwriting so bad, it was impossible to decipher. We figured out it was a ledger book. Slaves, we decided. It felt unique to be shouted at by stage manager for trying on the oversized Zulu headdress. That is what of the rest of the piece lacked: interaction or even acknowledgement of the audience. Cohen and Dhlamini existed in a self-indulgent bubble.
Anyway, enough about that.
Right, so my highlights of fest this year are....
THEATRE
Red by John Logan. This 2010 Tony Award-winning play, directed by Steven Stead and featuring father-son duo Michael and Jeremy Richards, is about artist Mark Rothko and his famous acceptance and then refusal of the commission for the restaurant at The Four Seasons. A beautiful, nostalgic, romantic text and Michael Richards as Rothko played with text, voice and language in an inspirational way.
The only disappointment was that for theatre realism, the paintings looked nothing like actual Rothkos... a detail that to someone like me, made a world of difference.
Also, I am told that Alfred Molina played Rothko on Broadway. That must have been insane.
CONCEPTUAL ART
Mikhael Subotzky truly deserved his award as Standard Bank Young Artist 2012 for Fine Art. His exhibition, Retinal Shift, was an uncomfortable but supremely welcome experience *The writer has a super huge creative crush on Mr Subotzky. The writer thinks he's sexily clever.* Retinal Shift's starting point is photograph below of the artists's retina (pictured below).
The exhibition investigates the process of looking. Subotzky re-contextialises and re-looks at his oeuvre on a retrospective wall, shattering the glass over some of the photographs. He goes further, using cctv and surveillance footage to re-look at the history of photographic devices, archival portraits to re-look at the history of South Africa, and video interviews and tours with local tour guides to re-look at the history of Grahams town. The latter, titled Moses and Griffiths after its subjects, in the Gallery in the Round, was my absolute highlight. The four video channels were expertly woven together to form a narrative of multiple viewpoints.
PERFORMANCE ART
Brett Bailey's Exhibit A is an exhibition created around notions of colonialism and the human zoo. The installations are pure visual poetry and feature real people. They represent various atrocities experienced by Africans at the hands of their European colonisers over the past one hundred odd years. They are didactic for Europeans whose history lessons exclude the horror stories of abuse, murder and genocide. The performers in the zoo stare straight back at you, a confrontational and enthralling experience, since I was born on the African continent and felt uncaused by their stares. That was perhaps the major failing of staging Exhibit A in South Africa, that the majority of the audience weren't being blamed. So how are we supposed to react? Basically Bailey is saying human beings are despicable. They are kak to one another. He is telling the story of Europeans being kak to Africans. But I already knew the stories he was telling. I studied them in high school history class, unlike most Europeans. High school history taught me that everyone is pretty much kak to everyone else. So what? Exhibit A wasn't asking questions, it was telling me stuff I already knew. But I liked it immensely. And to say that I wasn't emotional afterwards would be a lie. But I also somehow felt strangely empowered and proud. And it was so pretty. And what was seriously cool is that we had to wait in a waiting room (like slaves waiting to be auctioned) to enter the exhibition so we could experience the exhibition alone, confront the human in class cabinets and behind barbed wire and chained to beds alone. The waiting room is where the real interesting stuff was going on.
DANCE
None. I only saw one dance piece in the festival, yet another Rhodes two-in-one student production on the fringe onto which Andrew Buckland's name is ceremoniously slapped so that people buy tickets although what he had to do with the actual piece remains a mystery since he neither appeared in, wrote or directed it. Little bit of a weird feminist rant. Awful sound design. Yuk (see WISH I'D SEEN for dance pieces I wish I'd seen).
MUSIC
None. Didn't see anything. I know nothing. I usually go by word of mouth on the music front and nothing was recommended. Oh wait, I saw one act. I was in a dodgy hole in the wall called Champs Action Bar and some angst-y teenage death metal started playing... I left.
FILM
Lars von Trier's Melancholia. Ok, so I go on about this film all the time and some people don't dig it so much and I didn't actually watch it again in Grahamstown but the fact that it was screened at the film festival makes me happy because it's pretty.
ON THE GREEN
Best store by far was Farah Hernandez Porcelain. Farah is the coolest person I've ever met. Why?
1.
She's married to Gary Thomas
2.
She's Spanish.
3.
She's from Grenada, the same place as Lorca
4.
She makes the most insane porcelain jewelry, vases and pots etc. Find her on Facebook. She's amazing.
NIGHTLIFE
The Drill Hall, a performance venue for many a year, is the new festival home-base (Get it? It's a military building...) of Joburg-based theatre company The Framework. Upstairs it has a restaurant and bar called The Eatery. Good buffet-style food, lots of whisky, a balcony. Hope it's back next year.
ON THE STREET
Stuart Lightbody doing street magic. I will never forget how four years ago, in the back room of The Rat and Parrot, he got me to write my name on the four of clubs, shuffled it into the deck and then produced the very same card, neatly folded into quarters, from his mouth seconds later. I was less thirty centimeters away from him. I see his show almost every year. I still have that card.
WISH I'D SEEN
The delicious Gary Thomas, formerly of Cabins In the Forest. He never disappoints. And he did the sound for Three Little Pigs (Another show I wish I'd seen, see below).
Performa Obscura. This is a performance art collaboration between Mikhael Subotzsky and Athi-Patra Ruga, as they link two exhibtions at this year's festival, Making Way and Subotzky's Retinal Shift (see above). The performance can only be views through a Victorian camera obscura.
Afternoon of a Foehn and Vortex. Both shows are part of the French Exchange programme on the festival this year *and the writer is, after all, a Francophile.* Both are contemporary dance pieces (I don't care what you think about it, I like contemporary dance) that use plastic bags as media. Both produced by the Non Nova. Had a ticket to Vortex but missed it as I was rushing to PE.
Three Little Pigs. Check it: James Cairns, Albert Pretorius, Rob van Vuuren. Three of South Africa's premier actors do political satire using a classic fairy tale. Weeping and weeping and weeping that I missed this.
Mango Groove. Because 'Special Star' and the Disney anthology are the seminal songs of my childhood.
Race by David Mamet. Because it is a Mamet. I love Mamet. Mamet is a god. And Michael Richards was in it. Michael Richards is also quite godlike. And because I'm directing a Mamet piece soon for varsity. Mamet is a god. Did I mention it was a Mamet? I love Mamet.
There you have it. What I thunked about it all. Will I go back next year? Two serious car accidents in two consecutive years suggest not and the plan is not to be in the country this time next year, but you never know....
