With most of the productions developed by community theatre groups, the FNB Vita Drama Festival is at the right place – the Windybrow Centre for the Arts, writes Bafana Khumalo
The house is perched on a hill – a hill that a group of joggers use as a kind of masochistic obstacle course, running backwards up its steep incline. The residents of a nearby 10-storey apartment block look down on the house, slightly bored as they go about their daily chores.
This house – a Victorian-style former nurses’ home – is the Windybrow Centre for the Arts. Slap bang in the middle of Hillbrow, it was for a long time the Windybrow Theatre – a colonial outpost of sorts. That is until 1992 when the then powers that be saw the writing on the wall and decreed that it would from thence forth be less highbrow and more Hillbrow.
The head driver of this new plan came in the form of Vryburg cultural activist Walter Chakela who was appointed artistic director. “Hey man, the things we do in this country!” he exclaims, shaking his head in pleased disbelief as he looks upon singer Kori Moraba doing his thing on stage.
Moraba is an old-style crooner who used to enthrall audiences in the Seventies by taking traditional religious and wedding songs, jigging them up a bit and making it hip for the hip to hum them and retain their hipness. He disappeared from the music scene for the bulk of the Eighties and early Nineties. Now he is making a comeback as one of the headliners at the annual FNB Vita Drama Festival at the Windybrow.
Mokaba is just one of the superstars of the festival which also features the talents of people like Tu Nokwe, Zakes Mofokeng, Don Mlangeni and a myriad of community theatre performers, like ensemble choir The Sounds of KwaGuqa, supervised by the Soweto String Quartet’s Prince Lengoasa.
These artists are flagpoling the centre’s journey into the 21st century. Quite a Seventies feel for a journey that is leaving this century behind. Was it deliberate on the part of the festival to concentrate on this single decade? “Originally we wanted it to be broader than that,” says Chakela, “We had planned to look at South African art for the last 100 years.” He explains that a lack of funds scuttled these plans, and along with them went the idea of tributes to African writers like Sol Plaatje and HR Dhlomo.
With the available finance the festival is putting on Mofokeng’s production, A New Song, which premiered at the Cultural Resistance Festival in Botswana in 1982. Mlangeni will be poking fun at the abortion debate in a play called Abor 90s. On the musical front, there’s African balladeer Vusi Mahlasela and Nokwe will be perfoming songs like Nyakanyaka.
While disappointed that such an ambitious project had to be trimmed so radically, Chakela feels quite optimistic about the future of the centre. Prior to the change, he stresses, the centre’s main focus was Europe. “We are now a centre that recognises that we are located on the African continent and should have as our focus the people of this continent.”
Hence the centre has concentrated on putting on plays written by Africans, with emphasis on education-based plays. “Although we are un- ashamedly African, we define Africanness in a much broader sense (than colour),” explains Chakela, adding that this year there are people who are not black who are part of the festival.
Interestingly, the one play by white actors, a workshopped production directed by Jozua Myers, bemoans the diminished role of whites in the country. This dark comedy tells of a white actor who goes to a sangoma, demanding that he be turned black because all the plum roles go to blacks.
Most productions at the festival have been put together by community theatre groups, something of which Chakela is proud in that it fulfils his intention of making the Windybrow the development centre of the arts in this country.
Chakela is confident that the future is bright for the centre. “We are looking to make the Windybrow self-sufficient to some extent,” he says. “This we plan to do by putting up the kind of programming that the working class would like to see.”
His plans also include more vigorous marketing, including subscription schemes for prospective audiences. They are also planning to attract more corporate activity, like inviting companies to hold their functions at the centre.
This plan to woo people back to the centre might be aided by government funding, some of which will go towards renovating the place. Judging by the numbers of people walking past the centre, compared to the number of bums on seats, Chakela might well be described as an optimist, but his faith that the centre can be turned around is encouraging.
The future of the Windybrow has started now, it seems, with young dancers walking on to stage for the first time and hoping to make it big in the future. Who knows, maybe in the new century those joggers will forsake their uphill mission to walk leisurely into the house on the hill to drink in some culture.