Poetry readings and techno raves put punch into an often predictable Fringe, writes Alex Dodd
ONE flu-ridden Grahamstown local wildly theorised that the sewer system was under such pressure at this year’s festival that the purity of her drinking water had been affected.
The festival’s outsize status similarly affected the art scene — although art, unlike water, can be more palatable when less pure.
The size of this year’s festival meant it could accommodate all manner of cultural experimentation, so one didn’t have to be subjected to the gimmickry and faddishness that abounded on the theatrical front. Escape and inspiration came in the form of wild and raw poetry readings at the Glue Pot Bar, techno raving at World’s End and James Phillips’ first Afrikaans reggae song.
Superhuman resilience and tactical show-hunting strategies were rewarded with hot little pockets of risk-taking and artistic integrity — in the face of innumerable sosaties, and home-print T-shirts and traffic jams.
Phillips, who thrilled a rather small audience by putting his heart and guitar strings on the line, made a worthy plea to his fans. His new works and honest down-home banter did much to expel the bad taste that other glossier, less engaging, less local acts left in one’s mouth.
“Shout down the cover versions,” he said. “You know an American journalist asked me what was happening at the festival — what it’s got to offer this year. And I had to answer: `Well there’s Brel, there’s Piaf, there’s Porter, we’ve got two Stings this year …’ It’s embarrassing man! It’s bullshit!”
Antjie Krog made a similar point at a reading of works by Ingrid Jonker. The emphasis shouldn’t be on importing or exporting art at this point, she said, but on repossessing our own languages — our own heritage. We should be translating Afrikaans poetry into Xhosa, Zulu into English. She is currently involved in just such a project (along with poet Sandile Dikeni).
She pointed to Jonker’s poetry, which she said had been largely denied to English readers who had received a politically sanitised, purified version of Jonker’s life works. Angela Craig read the English translations in a moving harmony with Krog, who turned Jonker’s poetry into music — sounds slipping and falling from her tongue.
Dogmas were seriously and jubilantly overhauled at this series of poetry readings, set up by New Coin editor and poet, Robert Berold. The new voices of Tswana musician Duncan Senyatso and musical wordsmiths Ike Muila and Isabella Mothadinyana were welcomed with encores. Both Muila and Mothadinyana are members of the Soweto-based Botsotso Jesters.
Muila’s verbal cutups have a magnetic effect, with a strangely unfettered approach to the languages that have separated us. Like a semantic juggler, he switches effortlessly within each poem from tongue to tongue, allowing access points for the speakers of so many of South Africa’s languages.
Mothadinyana delivered a selection of jazzy pieces with an attractive combination of defiance and fragility. Hers was a physical performance. In her gestures — entire verses.
The wonderfully unruly night-time sessions at the Glue Pot Bar sparked some bold, if slurred, analysis. South African audiences tend to be extremely well behaved — clapping, laughing and sighing on cue, so Lesogo Rampolokeng’s noisy provocations to insult and praise were delicious.
“The distinction between literary and oral tradition is breaking down here!” anounced one audience member. “There’s something wrong with that distinction to start with,” declaimed a poet. Rampolokeng aired his outrage at being labelled an “angry young man and frothing-at-the-mouth dog”.
Said a young guy from Port Elizabeth: “In a time when most of us are alienated under the increasing hold of technology we need to hear voices — hear people actually speaking.”
“This is music, rap, words … the lot. It’s miscegenated and self- referential. Not evaluable in terms of one discourse. To call it poetry is a disservice. There’s a need to break out of the ghettoisation of poetry,” said Vista English lecturer James Sey who had, earlier in the day, delivered a probing post-modernist lecture entitled Is There Life After 2001?
Berold delicately contended: “We agree that it’s unclassifiable, but does that really matter? Isn’t this just about someone with a whole mind responding to his environment? How about some more poems?”
Another happening that succeeded in provoking some kinetic response to an environment was World’s End. The techno scene succeeded in pulling crowds to Grahamstown’s decaying and almost Dickensian power station.
Mega volts of sound pumped through the factory-like space. Darkness was punctuated by the flickerings of strobed light and multiple video screens radiating streams of images — digital Dali … Kafka on acid (although smart drinks were the order of the night). In its transplantation to Grahamstown the techno scene underwent a metamorphosis from the yuppie- style disco strain, big in the city, to the more subversive outer edges of the movement.
`It’s a reinvocation of the kind of oppositionality of the Sixties,” said sound engineer cum temp-club manager cum Wits psychology lecturer Anthony Collins. “In the intensity of the hypnotic base beats is an attempt to create a tribal experience and a collective altered state of consciousness on the dance floor.”
But this was not simply a dance floor as we know it. The music, the illuminated wall art, the video imagery, the conscious sculpting of space, the comix, the underground book stand set up by Paul Wessels of Deep South Distribution contributed in conjunction to World’s End’s distinction from the average club setup.
Said Collins: “It’s my agenda to sell techno as a cultural political happening.”
Not too far from the madding crowd, World’s End succeeded in providing one of the few arresting cultural political alternatives to the often predictable, sometimes predictably adolescent theatre on the Fringe.