Matthew Krouse
Say what you like about the programme of the National Arts Festival this year: lament that it’s not brimming with overseas acts, like last year – the 25th birthday bash – or moan about the state of the indigenous performing arts. Whatever one may feel about the festival, it’s providing a bunch of die-hard media junkies with a unique laboratory within which to further some way-out concepts in multimedia production.
Over the decades, those who’ve attended the festival have read Cue, the local newspaper that has always managed to co-opt serious critics, as well as journalism students, into contributing reviews. Cue has now extended its complement of mediums into television and the internet in a handful of years.
This year the newspaper will be edited by Rhodes University senior lecturer in journalism Catherine Knox, who will be overseeing the nine editions that will come out daily in the course of the festival. At a moderate estimate, Knox expects to produce between 2E000 and 3E000 copies of the newspaper daily. For this, the outfit, run almost entirely by journalism students, will extend its distribution personnel from two individuals to four.
If this seems pretty low-tech then the rest of the Cue-Media – as the business is known – proposal is just about as “cyber” as things can get. Rhodes’s Christo Doherty continues his task this year as executive producer. The big plan Doherty has engineered this year involves integrated television and online internet broadcasts in conjunction with the internet service provider M-Web. Festival-time highlights that will be shown on the net will include a co-hosted season of short films that will also be broadcast on DStv.
Cue-TV, the television aspect of the media configuration, has been running since 1997 and has become an indispensable part of festival attendance. This year the station adds to its staff art director Anton Burggraaf, former staffer of the television production house The Line producers and former director of Screenplay on SABC3.
This year’s programming on Cue-Tv, which can be seen on monitors at select venues in Grahamstown, and on channel 97 on DStv, comprises five separate shows with different emphases. A review programme will look at the fringe events and the festival as it affects Grahamstown. A programme of interviews will take an in-depth look at the main festival only. A separate programme will chart the alternative culture at the festival and a sundowner programme will be run from the 1820 Settlers Monument comprising live transmission of live drama and musical acts.
According to Doherty, the radio station functioning on Rhodes University campus provides the only medium not yet co-opted into the Cue-Media process. This is, however, on the cards for the festival in the future.