The once-staid centre of Pretoria is bursting with cultural life waiting to be released, writes Charl Blignaut
It’s a very different Church Square that we approach on a sweltering Sunday morning – and it’s not just that the drag queen trippling on the grass is drawing more attention from the startled pigeons than from the sedate breakfast guests.
Slap in front of Pretoria’s notorious statue of Paul Kruger is a long table elegantly laden with designer plates, resting in the shade of designer umbrellas. And in front of the table, a group of the dishiest traditional dancers are hurling themselves around the concrete; a man with a loud hailer explaining the cultural significance of each dance.
It’s difficult to imagine that that spot there on the concrete, where a lithe young black man from Thembisa brings down his foot, was once the temporary resting place of Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging leader Eugene Terre’Blanche’s butt as he fell from his horse, trying to lead his motley white supremacists into battle across the square they had all but claimed before marching onward into town, towards the monolithic State Theatre. Just another little irony punctuating exactly how absolutely Pretoria has changed since 1994. (Another is that Terre’Blanche recently released a CD recording of his poems.)
Still, all this activity is nothing compared with the possibilities. If the hostess of this morning’s events, Lam Ebershn, has her way – and it’s seldom that she doesn’t – then within a few short months this square and those three blocks down to the State Theatre will have become the new Pretoria’s crowning achievement; putting the culture back into the capital.
Ebershn, working with her partner Elsa Lamb, with the various necessary councils and with property owners in the area, has got the go-ahead to create a massive cultural precinct. Her selling point is the truly magnificent and deserted old Capitol Theatre just off the square. Her pitch is “24-hour activity. We want public culture spaces, shops, residential development, film festivals, street soccer … a place for normal people in Pretoria, black people, artists …”
Already Ebershn has had the buses removed from the square and negotiated a happier deal with the hawkers. On December 6 the Capitol hosts a Christmas concert, just another new iniative in a city fast becoming one of the most exciting cultural homes on the continent.
Just a few weeks back artist Diek Grobler appropriated the city hall for one of his bizarre works, rich in avant-garde imagery. Just a few months ago, the neighbouring township, Mamelodi, watched their best-known community theatre group, Mato, climb aboard a plane and head for the Edinburgh Festival.
Certainly all of this paints an optimistic picture, enough to get rumours of a “Pretoria theatre renaissance” going. I phone the local expert, Diane de Beer, arts editor of the Pretoria News. “Hmmm,” she goes, then chuckles nervously. I know how she feels. I have just spent the afternoon wandering around the passages of Pretoria’s State Theatre in search of a theatre revolutionary, a zealot, a happy person, anything, anything at all but those Orwellian set builders.
“I’d say Pretoria could undergo a theatre revolution,” says De Beer, choosing her words with care, “we have all the elements we need for that to happen, but they need to be brought together. People go out here. Performers always say that we have such wonderful audiences … The State Theatre tries, but somehow there isn’t a support structure that can carry the work further.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Junior Makhoere, the leader of Mato. “There is growth in the community, people are coming forward. But resources are always a problem.” Tell me about it. If it wasn’t for some fabulous person called Caroline who lives in the now- defunct Mamelodi News offices I might never have even spoken to Makhoere. Still, there are a good dozen projects between Mamelodi and Atteridgeville.What will become increasingly clear over the next few days is that the spark that could ignite a renaissance will be Ebershn and Lamb’s Capitol Theatre Project: a platform.
The work itself is indeed undergoing some sort of movement, spurred on by the growth of the national festival circuit. All it needs now is a co- ordinator. God knows, every single project – community or otherwise – that I speak to has dismissed Pact and the State Theatre’s handling of that role as, at best, “inaccessible”, at worst, “fucking clueless”.
But the Capitol project could well force the State Theatre to open its doors. “We’re the other end of the project,” says Pact’s Barry Snow proudly. But when I ask how he hopes to use the venture to open Pact’s doors to the people, he gives me the usual string of “working on initiating a process to investigate the possibilities” kind of crap that has artists like Diek Grobler climbing the walls.
Back at the breakfast, the pigeons are a little calmer and the drag queen transfixed by the Zulu dancers, I chat with Grobler. Whether his rejection of the Afrikaner establishment is part of a persecution complex, or whether he is indeed denied access to funds and support, hardly seems the point. The point is that, as with Makhoere, Grobler’s work continues with passion, precisely because it’s a struggle. Pretoria’s former conservatism has bred a generation of theatre that’s used to promoting and looking after itself; fostering audiences and making venues become available.
Ask Natanil, the city’s premiere entertainment star. “I looove Pretoria. Here, I swear, the place is packed. All you have to do is book and tell the paper and they come. The thing is there’s so much money here, and all the embassies. Here we bath and dress up to go to the theatre and we buy programmes and we always eat cake at interval. Jissis, you’ve never seen so many beautiful boys in one foyer anywhere else in your life. There’s hundreds of new venues, everywhere there’s cabaret and live music and there’s so much oxygen because everyone here is boombefok. We plant things.”