Winning the Standard Bank Young Artist Award can launch a career. GLYNIS O’HARA talks to the four artists who topped their class
THE importance of the 1997 Standard Bank Young Artist Award, announced this week, cannot be over-estimated for the winners. People slogging away at their canvases, writing or music in their back rooms, are suddenly in arts pages and arts programmes throughout the country.
Singer Sibongile Khumalo, now the darling of the South African music scene, was known only to a few before she won the award in 1993. Indeed, she says it “catapulted” her into the public eye and made a great difference to her career.
Other recent winners include Christopher Kindo, Pippa Skotnes, Jerry Mofokeng, Sam Nhlengethwa, Jane Alexander, Boyzie Cekwana, Trevor Makhoba and Victor Masondo. None of them are unknown names.
The award includes a guarantee of substantial financial backing for festival participation in the following year and a cash prize of R8 000.
This year’s lucky three – Lien Botha for visual art, Geoffrey Hyland for drama, Sibongile Mngoma for music – were announced on Wednesday this week, with a fourth, special award, for choreographer/educationist Alfred Hinkel.
Hinkel’s special award is not an annual presentation (the last person to receive one was Pieter-Dirk Uys in 1989), but is awarded from time to time for “exceptional and sustained service”. His award is for his “vision, commitment and contribution” to dance in South Africa.
* SIBONGILE MNGOMA
`I GREW up in a house of music,” says Mngoma (25), Sibongile Khumalo’s niece. “My grandfather, Professor Xhabi Mngoma, was head of the music department at the University of Zululand.
“And my father is a cellist. I trained in classical music on the violin till about Standard Nine, when I sang in a choir.
“The way it worked, the teacher simply decided that you looked as if you could sing and said be there for choir rehearsals. I always managed to run away before, but this time I couldn’t. Two weeks later I was told I was going to do the solo piece and I cried, because I didn’t want to be there and I was scared of being the focus of attention.”
Now cultural organiser at Wits Technikon, and a UCT honours graduate in drama, with a diploma in opera, she’s appeared in Carmen, The Magic Flute, La Boheme and Enoch Prophet Of God, as well as singing in Shaka ka Senzangakhona, Porgy and Bess and Last Night of the Proms.
She confesses that opera is now her favourite form of singing: “I feel most comfortable with it now.” But she won’t be drawn on her ambitions. “I have dreams … if it happens, it happens.”
* ALFRED HINKEL
`I’M not even sure what it’s for yet,” says Hinkel (43), laughing, “after all, I’m not a young artist any more. They’ll have to change the title. But I suspect it’s for development work, for training black dancers basically.”
Hinkel, now artistic director of Capab’s Jazzart Dance Theatre, has been running Jazzart, one of the oldest modern dance companies in the country, since 1986. He was born in Nababeep in Namaqualand and his father insisted he learn boxing when he first announced he wanted to dance. But dance he did in the end, and found that dance education was his main interest.
Jazzart, now a small company with seven permanent members, has for the past few years been the modern dance arm of Capab. Its multiple education projects include a private school, another school in Langa, where two teachers give classes every day, two more teachers who travel a large area to teach at state schools and a project based at the Joseph Stone Building, running Saturday classes, and a three-week summer school.
His choreography has included Bolero (Vita award), Annie Barnes’s The Yo Kids Holiday Show, which opens at the Civic Theatre in Johannesburg on December 10.
* GEOFFREY HYLAND
`I’M very happy about this award, very excited and very honoured,” says Hyland. “They told us about six weeks ago and I’ve been sitting on a secret for so long.”
A director and designer, Hyland (37), is a full-time lecturer in the University of Cape Town (UCT) drama department and is set on doing Madame De Sade by Yukio Mishima at next year’s festival. Apparently it examines what De Sade was on about, and the behaviour of his wife, who stayed faithful to him throughout his 20 years in prison and left him the moment he was released.
Hyland’s Western Cape successes include The Yellow Wallpaper, which has done an extensive tour of Canada, French Gray and Miss Margarida’s Way, all starring Claire Berlein. He did his master’s degree at York University in Toronto, hence the strong Canadian connection.
He notes that theatre worldwide is turning more towards a festival mentality -“We’re becoming travelling players again” – and that “chamber theatre” is developing. By this he means smaller audiences for particular plays and multi-skilled actors.
And as for those who think theatre is dying: “I do the auditioning for UCT and we got a record number of applicants this year. So the need and the enthusiasm are there.”
* LIEN BOTHA
`I WAS quite dumbstruck when I heard,” says artist Lien Botha (35). “I’ve never won anything before. And it’s a privilege to be given the time and finance to create a new body of work.”
Trained at Michaelis, she’s Pretoria-born but has been living in Cape Town for 13 years. She uses photographs in constructions and installations and is pleased that the award is being made, for the first time, for photography as a medium.
“My work involves the human landscape juxtaposed with the geographic one … I often work with personal history, but widening it out. Inevitably what you do comes out of your own life, but I love the surrealist movement and am influenced by it.”
She has held two solo exhibitions and has been in several two-person and group shows, such as the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale and this year’s Faultlines: Inquiries into Truth and Reconciliation. It was staged at Cape Town’s Castle in July and 13 artists were asked to do work on the TRC, with the option of using the University of the Western Cape’s (UWC) archives in the Mayibuye Centre.
She also participated in a joint installation called Krotoa’s Room in Lisbon with Raymond Smith. And she has curated two exhibitions, including Photo Works by Women in 1994.