Jennifer Ferguson’s show Untimely is at present running at the Barney Simon Theatre in the Market Theatre complex until November 20. The performance coincides with the CD release of her 1989 album of the same name, to which a dynamic cover version of the Dave Marks song Master Jack has been added.
During December she will be performing every Sunday night at The Edge, a new club in Cape Town.
How does it feel to be back at the Market Theatre again after three years?
It’s the same and it’s not the same. I feel the presence of Barney Simon very strongly sometimes and at others I feel his absence. We cross and we uncross the same river.
What do you mean by that?
It’s the glorious paradox of our being, the sound of one hand clapping! I had a very strong desire to perform at the Market Theatre again – it is the only true theatre space left in the country.
What do you feel about the state of music and theatre in South Africa?
Theatre and music should be freely available to everyone. Theatre and music spaces are places where national healing could take place. Maybe theatre and music were never meant to be commercial commodities – especially here in Africa, where you find the greatest theatre in the street.
But how do you pay the bills?
Government and city spending should prioritise the arts; in Berlin for example, the city employs buskers on the street. We need to acknowledge ours more accordingly. Give them medical aid, give them pension schemes, give them unemployment.
Where do you live?
I live in a beautiful old house in Jeppestown and a beautiful old farmhouse in Sweden. I am very blessed.
Why all the globetrotting?
I married a Viking, who, like me, is happy to live in two homes. Both my husband, Anders, and I are in love with our own and each other’s cultures, each other’s countries. Our music is a bridge, of course – two worlds coming together.
What do you love about South Africa?
I can’t answer this question in a few lines. It is of me. It is my poetry. It is my dumbness. It is my speechlessness. It is my song. It is my place of miracles in hell. The sky so blue it bruises me. It’s my mother birth to me. It is all I know and what I can never name.
What does your re-release of your 1989 album, Untimely, mean to you?
It’s a baby born at exactly the right time. For reasons beyond my understanding, something in the album needed to be finished. Perhaps because in its music collaboration, working with people like Victor Masondo, Nico Carstens, Bruce Cassidy and Moses Taiwa Molelekwa it’s an important part of my cultural heritage.
What is your millennium resolution?
To experience fully every moment of this precious life. To take risks, make more music. To go to an ashram in Kerala where the mother lives, to see the bay of Bombay. To learn to speak better Swedish and to skate! To find the stillness in the turmoil of the turning of the world.
Jennifer Ferguson spoke to Hester de Beula- Gail