Muting the instruments
Previous Grahamstown jazz festivals have usually been followed by one South African musician or another sounding off to the press. In the past, artists have had gripes about pay, conditions and programming. This year, you heard none of that; we can guarantee it. But the post-festival silence doesn’t mean that everything in PJ’s garden is lovely. It’s just that the artists’ contracts carry a clause forbidding all discussion of the organisers’ conduct. So this year, jazzmen are speculating about what will happen to any bold souls who break the silence and about how this squares up with the Constitutional right to free speech. But they’re speculating pianissimo.
Festival interruptus
It was thoughtful of the organisers to put condoms in the media and artists’ kits. Only later did we hacks discover that we got two apiece, while the musicians got four. Another case of the declining pulling power of the press?
The game people play
Duma Ka Ndlovu’s The Game, brought down by the Windybrow theatre, was amazing, but gossip around the media centre is that the show might be prevented from being performed in the US because an American playwright claims The Game is a plagiarisation of her work.
No vibe; lots of sales
There was a lot of talk about how vibeless this year’s festival was. For sure, there were fewer people and main ticket sales dropped by 20%. That’s too bad because many agree there were more interesting things than before. One artist’s comment that “it doesn’t feel like an arts festival but one big fleamarket” also rang true.
Committed to crime
Petty crime continued … An extremely uncool incident was that the young cast of Shadow Stories had all their belongings stolen. So Windybrow arranged that donations be given to them. But the police seemed to spend a lot of time raiding young people’s parties for drugs.
Let bygones be forgone
Right next to the monument building is Fort Selwyn Arms. There the Battle Re-enactment Society runs a pub and every night crackpots dress up in elaborate 1820s military and other costumes and all have great fun reliving their lurid colonial past.
that was a war signal :To protect Graham