We profile the four winners of the 1998 Standard Bank Young Artist Award
Aubrey Sekhabi, 28-year-old winner of the 1998 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Drama, is “a relentless, tenacious spirit”, says Dan Robbertse of the Performing Artists Workers Equity.
“He’s been doing great work in North West province as drama director with very little, and it’s difficult to create as prolifically as he does so far away from the cultural hub.”
Sekhabi – a writer, director and actor from Soshanguve – enjoyed his most recent success with On My Birthday, which was staged at the Market in 1996, and then mounted at the Lincoln Centre Festival in New York.
“It was done in a kind of realist-cum-soap opera vein,” says Robbertse, “looking at a simple situation and dealing with heavy issues like violence against women.”
Sekhabi’s Homegirls was on the main festival programme in Grahamstown last year, and Not with My Gun, a new play he co-wrote and directed, is opening in North West soon.
“I know everybody will be watching and wondering what makes me deserving, but it is a wonderful challenge,” he said.
Sekhabi has been involved in theatre since primary school. He wrote his first play at 15 and enrolled at the Wits drama school in 1988.
After his studies, he returned to Soshanguve to create work for the stage without sponsorship: “I wanted to create works which reflected our social life, to avoid our heritage being buried”.
Another play, Mika, won the FNB Vita Award for the most original production in 1994, and Sekhabi’s Roadhouse was nominated for a Dalro for the most original South African musical in the same year.
South African theatre, he says, is “all over the place” and going through a “laboratory phase.
“We need to go through this process to find a way of telling our own stories, which will appeal to black and white, young and old – universal stories.” – Glynis O’Hara
The earth and fire dance duo Debbie Rakusin and Madunalo David Matamela had hardly recovered from the excitement of their tour of Australia and the Melbourne International Festival, when they were told the news that they won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for 1998.
For Rakusin, the award is a sign, “like fate. It is telling David and myself that we’re meant to work together.” She said getting recognition at home is “far more self-satisfying than international exposure”.
Their company, Visions Dance, is renowned for its synthesis of African dance and jazz, creating funky works with a crisp, decisive style. Matamela, who started off as a student of Rakusin, is coming into his own as a choreographer with a vision. “This award gives me hope and the encouragement to keep on doing what I love,” he said. – Swapna Prabhakaran
Nhlanhla Xaba, winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art, believes in the role of art “in transformation on a personal level as well as of our country”.
In his address on receiving the award, he said it was “the highest honour” he could receive in his artistic career and one he accepted with “a mixture of shock, joy and fear”.
“I’m absolutely thrilled for him,” said Kim Berman, his co-director in the Artist Proof Studio, “because he’s not an obvious choice. He’s completely devoted to community outreach and teaching and doesn’t give himself enough credit as an artist. This will be an incentive to push his work to the front. In his work he deals with the tension between traditional and urban existence, between African spirituality and urban emptiness.” – Glynis O’Hara
This year’s Standard Bank Young Artist Award for music goes to a real-life composer, that august occupation that some South Africans feel must be “preserved”, while others want to consign it to the dust heap of Eurocentrism.
So how refreshing that Bongani Ndodana is a 22-year-old native of the Eastern Cape who speaks Xhosa rather than German, talks of access to music as a right instead of a privilege, and is frank about his work emerging in “a cultural paradox”.
“As part of my quest for an identity as an African, I have been drawn more and more towards an `African aesthetic’ within my art form, which is riddled with European conventions,”says Ndodana.
Born in Queenstown and educated in Grahamstown, Ndodana was unable to receive his award personally at Monday’s ceremony in Johannesburg. He is currently in Chicago where his string quartet The Sun, the Moon and the Rain had its world premire last week.
This follows an impressive year’s work; performances of his chamber opera Temba and Seliba by the Co-Opera Company in Grahamstown, a recording of his ballet score Episodes by the Cape Town Philharmonic with Ndodana conducting and a showcase performance of excerpts from an operatic work in progress.
And in the light of his appointment as composer-in-residence with the Candoulay Dance Company in Toronto, Canada, he probably counts as one of the only South African composers who has a job as a composer.
Listen for the work he will produce in the light of this award at next year’s Standard Bank National Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown. – Brett Pyper
Ndodana’s music ranges fairly widely in style, but a tendency to explore indigenous choral genres in relation to Western dramatic forms like opera and oratorio seems to be emerging. And even if his precocity sometimes seems to outpace propriety, Ndodana is the kind of figure that South Africa needs to support and nurture.