The Bartel Arts Trust is injecting life into the arts scene in Durban, writes Humphrey Tyler
DURBAN’S Bartel Arts Centre hasn’t got a door on its harbourside headquarters yet — the builders haven’t finished the entrance and you have to jump over the foundations to get inside — but it started full tilt this week with a programme of one or two and sometimes three events in the city each day.
It won’t be long before even the least interested local citizens begin to notice something, well, strange and different is going on.
For example, who are those people over there painting pictures on the city walls? And what do you mean you’ve got “a museum” in that suitcase?
Some of the first programmes now on the go are sit-back- and-watch affairs, like a festival of videos from around the world, including a feature from Argentina on the tango. But several others are fully participatory, like the Happy Birthday Democracy short story competition. The winners will be read out on April 27 at various venues; there are cash prizes for the five best stories and the best 15 will be published.
Anybody can enter. Don’t write more than 2 000 scintillating words. Send your entry to BAT, PO Box 6064, Durban 4000.
April, because of the elections last year, features importantly. Apart from the story competition there is also a Happy Birthday Democracy poster competition. If you haven’t designed a poster before, you can enrol for the BAT poster course which runs towards the end of March.
Curiously, bottles and tables seem to feature heavily with the BAT people. Maybe it’s drink? There is a Made with Bottles art and craft exhibition next month in which contestants are invited to test their creativity by painting, sculpting, conceptualising, photographing – – even breaking — a bottle or lots of bottles. Entries must be at the BAT centre on March 18, and the exhibition will be opened on March 27.
Say the organisers: “The aim of the exhibition is to encourage creative experimentation and risk-taking, and to generate debate around form, content and artistic values and tastes.” Experimentation and risk-taking seem to be a lot of what BAT is about. But so is art.
Tables feature in a dance or drama contest set for a week in August. Anything goes except “a table must be an integral part of the piece”.
Entries for the Bat festival can last for between five and 25 minutes and any that are good enough could feature in a special Table Festival in the BAT Theatre. This “theatre” at present is an open space with a concrete mixer surrounded by sweating builders, scaffolding and some men restoring intricately cut old teak windows. It is due to open, with the rest of the centre, including a big front door, on June 24.
All is not, however, frivolity and levity. There are lunchtime educational programmes, an off-beat Zulu language course, a contemporary issues forum where a panel and visitors discuss topical issues and a special BAT study group.
This is preparing proposals to be put to a fullscale BAT conference on “cultural tourism”. Does that mean living in a hut? Could be. But it could also mean much more, like the importance of a city having a first-rate symphony orchestra, the Midlands Meander trips through potters’ studios and weavers’ workshops, the annual Hilton Drama Festival which is drawing an increasing number of visitors to local inns and hotels, not to mention guided tours of mosques and temples, and the opportunity to witness exotic religious rites.