Covering the National Arts Festival is a bit like the Somewhere in California vignette in Jim Jarmusch’s film Coffee and Cigarettes, in which Tom Waits and Iggy Pop hook up to celebrate giving up smoking — by smoking.
Journalists are in Grahamstown to engage in the arts through critique. Yet in the blur of deadlines, interviews, shows and discussions, time for considerate reflection is minimal.
First impressions aren’t necessarily the most truthful, and gut responses aren’t necessarily the most valid — especially in the modern age of tweeting and blogging.
This became apparent during Monday’s opening performance of Sello Pesa’s dance piece Lime Light on Rites at the Commemoration Hall. A critique of the mass media’s exploitative tendencies and its propensity to manufacture consent, the initial tweeted response was: What a load of rubbish.
Two whole chickens get lubed-up with baby oil, stuffed with cotton-wool and pinned like voodoo dolls. A chair — on which a suited-up performer sat, shuffling around paper — gets murdered by another axe-wielding performer. So violent is the action that I was as scared for my life being taken by flying chunks of wood as I was two years ago when stuck in the Kennedy Road shack settlement in Durban as protesters were under siege from police firing indiscriminately into the area.
Meanwhile, Generations was on the television — at full blast — and dancers were derisively, and consciously, performing movements incorrectly.
Gut reaction: A load of bollocks. Yet, allowing the mind to wallow in the piece over a few hours of lovely food and gracious company, Lime Light got better and better.
The television’s invasiveness was obvious, but the multi-layered critique of media ownership revealed itself with each course, as did the insinuation that we are increasingly compelled to view the banal and the Matrix-type suggestions of those repercussions.
Beautiful Benchmarks
Earlier in the day Rob Murray’s Benchmarks at Graeme College was a simple, beautifully human story about relationships — that of a young Zimbabwean women and the shy home affairs clerk and reclusive widow she brings together.
The piece is set around the time of the xenophobic riots in South Africa two years ago and it is also where the treatment suffers its biggest flaw.
As pointed out by fellow M&G reviewer Percy Zvumoya, the “white paternalism” inherent in the piece — when the Zimbabwean is helped by two white South Africans after the attacks was inherently problematic.
This is especially true since the piece did not acknowledge the fact that not all poor black South Africans are necessarily xenophobic — a prime example being the good work social movements such as the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign did around the time of the attacks to educate people against hatred of the perceived other — and at times — mobilising communities to defend Somalis in Cape Town.
It is a flaw. But, Benchmarks remains a wonderfully simple story. The actors all use expressively on-point masks made by Cristina Salvoldi and the acting is first rate.
For more from the National Arts Festival, see our special report.
