Progressive policies are needed to make the Klein Karoo festival more inclusive, writes Lauren Shantall
It’s the only place where Bles Bridges performs solo inside Joshua Doore. Bheki Mkhwane and Ellis Pearson take their energetic physical theatre to the streets amid placards bearing questions like “Waar’s Ons Volkstaat?” brandished by black performance artists. It’s a week-long spectacle in which notions of language and power play themselves out on a makeshift stage. Too often I have the nagging suspicion I’m watching a tragi-comedy with a plot more obfuscatory than 1998’s Boklied.
In past years, contradictory cultural voices have been drowned by the sakkie sakkie blaring through the braai smoke in front of the CP Nel Museum. This year, however, Oudtshoorn is a decidely more interesting place to queue for koeksusters and tickets to Antionette Pienaar’s latest coup.
There is much that challenges the dominant version of Afrikaner identity or calls for a more sophisticated understanding of its complexities. In the closed-off Baron van Reede Street, the wrought-iron skeleton of an NG Kerk stands denuded, stripped of protective cladding, and rhetoric. It is tarred and feathered, with two national flags (the old and the new) made of glass suspended in its otherwise bare interior. The installation reflects the culpability of religious structures in perpetuating racism to all who tread on the shattered mirrors lining its floor.
Artist Matthew Haresnape’s House of God is one of 14 home-like structures on the DeKat- sponsored Oos Wes Tuis Bes show. Further along the public thoroughfare, Mustafa Maluka’s graffitti-blasted Wendy House is a crucial counterpoint to the overwhelmingly white crowds. Its interior recreates the typical, hip-hop influenced dcor of the average Cape Flats teenager. Maluka’s efforts are matched by Pat Mautloa’s photographs of a smoking brazier in a vacant lot which open up the space to represent the dispossessed and marginalised.
The Klein Karoo Kunstefees can’t get away from guilt. Conservatism and racism have dogged its short history – a fact which lends much-acclaimed director Marthinus Basson’s Ek, Anna van Wyk relevance. Echoing aspects of Haresnape’s theme, Anna is a belaboured Brechtian interrogation of Calvinism. A self- conscious examination of the role of theatre and the notion of “truth”, the play comments obliquely on the processes of the truth commission and directly on Afrikaner cultural heritage.
Bloedlyn explores inherited knowledge. Curator Lien Botha pairs contemporary visual artists with established writers and the resulting works are a blood-and-guts exploration of what we as South Africans have received, and what, by implication, we will pass on.
Attempting to address their own legacy, festival organisers, together with community workers, have started staging free shows in surrounding farm communities. Irna van Zyl, editor of Insig – the publication responsible for the aforementioned placard campaign – feels that “the fees has come a long way. Three years ago it was mainly white and you hardly saw any people of colour. Staging shows on the Voorbrandfees is a starting point to making it more inclusive.”
But, even if the message of the mammoth Kaktus concert marking the 10-year anniversary of the landmark “alternatiewe” Voelvry tour is that “die ou Suid Afrika is begrawe” [the old South Africa is buried], the fees still fails to entice non-white Afrikaans-speaking middle classes to the wake. Its notions need to be a little more progressive, perhaps.
Oos Wes co-curator Lize Hugo has “an enormous amount of aggression for this festival. I have seen changes … but there are still enormous gaps in the system.” At present there are only a few “coloureds” and no blacks involved in selection and decision- making processes, despite three positions currently open on the board of directors.
Nonetheless, the first-time presence of the Standard Bank Jazz fees creates a platform for renowned artists like Sylvia Mdunyelwa, Ezra Ngcukana and Robbie Jansen, and takes music in exciting directions. The inspired collaboration between Mac McKenzie’s more traditional goema/jazz outfit Namaqua, Prophets of da City rapper Mr Fat and South Africa’s champion scratch DJ Ready D raps jazz over the knuckles with hip-hop flair. When Mr Fat declares that “hip-hop’s takin’ over and it’s takin’ jazz with it”, it leaves you wishing the rest of the festival would embrace new forms so successfully.
If die taal is to outlive its first century then its self-proclaimed national fees needs a forward-looking management process to inclusively promote the arts rather than a burgeoning commercial venture which bolsters the dominance of a particular facet of Afrikaans culture.
Without it the festival will remain little more than a boere bazaar with the added attraction of some excellent shows, no matter how much its velskoens are window-dressed with faux leopard fur. Still, it’s a nascent entity, already being problematised from within – enough of a response to Ready D and Mr Fat’s challenge: “Are you ready?”