The festival of theatre at the Market Lab this weekend opens windows into a range of communities. David le Page reports
THE wealth of plays at the Market Laboratory’s Community Theatre Festival this weekend represents an outpouring of imaginative energy that could leave those whose only regular creative act is choosing a title at the video shop somewhat abashed.
A showcase of entertainment from black communities, the fifth annual FNB Vita- sponsored festival was launched on Thursday at the Newtown Cultural Precinct, where it will run until late Sunday afternoon.
The players hail mostly from within Gauteng, but there’s a sprinkling of visitors from elsewhere in the country. Three foreign troupes, from Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, are sure to attract attention, and give some indication of how far the Market Laboratory literally goes to promote and assist the efforts of a wide range of community
The Lab employs 17 part-time fieldworkers as a squad of cultural Lone Rangers, alert and responsive to requests from community groups for help in developing their own plays, poetry, song and dance.
Each fieldworker deals with a number of groups, and even with room for 30 groups in the festival, shortlisting those who will have the opportunity to perform for a Johannesburg audience is difficult. For every group that is in, the co-ordinators seem to have a fascinating account of one that didn’t make it.
The festival has evolved considerably in the five years it has been running. Apart from the growth in skills that has been stimulated by the efforts of the fieldworkers, the themes are constantly changing.
Not that there hasn’t always been diversity, but in the last couple of years, a number of the productions were afflicted with what Itumeleng Motsekoe, the festival administrator, calls the “Sarafina Syndrome”, a tendency to follow the idiom of enthusiastic musical theatre popularised by Mbongeni Ngema, complete with swarms of school kids and police.
But the political sea change has brought the themes back home. The national issues have been replaced by community issues, and this year’s line-up should open a range of windows into different communities through which the interested may peer. This is a major part of the value of the festival, for while participants strive for the highest standards, the results will not always stand scrutiny from anyone expecting slick
Apart from satisfying the need for self-expression and entertainment, the groups often provide early opportunities for those talents destined to make it on to the stages of the mainstream, and they have even attracted the alumni of more conventional schools back into the fold, as with Wits Drama graduate Bongani Linda, who is directing the Victory/Sonqoba group from Alex in Cry the Beloved Country.
Amid the bewildering line-up of events are a number of intriguing possibilities.
Paso Hola Majita, from a Soweto group, deals with jail experiences, exploring the lost world and perverse social orders in South African prisons, and the play is said to have profited from the personal experiences of some of the actors. The Bafutsana Players of Tembisa are staging Samson and Delilah, a production which has already visited Amsterdam and Belgium.
>From among a handful of musical productions comes a superficially unlikely combination of Zulu gumboot damce and rap presented by the Siyathemba Cultural Group. Malaika Mackenzi performs in Absolution, a one-hander about Aids, which should be refreshing simply for not detailing the mortal woes of middle-class Americans. And Things Men Do, a comedy about the hardships faced by women, written and directed by Martin Koboekae, won an award for Best Ensemble Work at the Windybrow Festival.
In addition to the work from communities, daily workshops will be open to visitors as well as participants, and two of these workshops, on singing and performance skills, will be held by guest facilitators Helen Chadwick and Richard Hahlo, members of the United Kingdom’s Royal National Theatre Studio.
The Community Theatre Festival is almost certainly not for those who prefer their performing arts as slickly packaged and unsurprising as a Big Mac. But those ready to be patient and persistent are sure to turn up some gems.