The National Arts Festival faces loss of sponsorship, while several productions on show this year investigate what it means to be male
Matthew Krouse
Grahamstown could do with a big cracker up its bum. One that’ll send its complacent residents scampering for answers to some pressing questions.
The fact that the National Arts Festival appears to be labouring under a crisis of direction has little to do with the open secret that its sponsor, Standard Bank, will withdraw a substantial degree of its funding in 2002. On the contrary. The loss of the bank’s annual blank cheque may give the festival the impetus it needs to restage an event with the uniqueness and verve it could achieve.
This year much of the big bash has a tired, washed-out feel to it. At the same time, in its theatre and art glimmers of genius abound. But they’re somewhat overshadowed by the “takeaway” mentality brought to town by fly-by-night entrepreneurs, who are here merely to rake in a quick buck.
These days there’s plenty of tasteless sex on the festival stages, while in the eateries there’s instant coffee and lots of tasteless toasted cheese. It’s a context that makes anything good appear brilliant – and anything mediocre appear good.
This is not to say that there isn’t a little hype at play. But looking over the crowds who amass at sunset to watch the televised Sundowner session in the centre court of the Settlers Monument, it’s difficult to comprehend the broader context in which the festival is taking place.
One wonders how many festival-goers actually know, or care, that Pretoria’s State Theatre is about to close, that 39 members of Johannesburg’s Civic Theatre staff have taken severance packages and the theatre is now under new management, that the Market Theatre is about to retrench 32 of its staff and that it is questionable whether the Windybrow arts complex will make it to the end of the year.
On July 3 the festival’s talking platform, the Winter School, held an open forum on issues facing the funding of the arts. Present were Nicola Danby of Business and Arts South Africa, Kiren Thathia of the National Arts Council, journalist and arts practitioner John Matshikiza and Carol Steinberg, adviser to the Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, Ben Ngubane.
It was a sad little discussion attended by less than 100 people, most of whom survive off the arts. It was like being at a post-mortem – everyone there to discover why an innocent victim had died. In the context of this year’s festival, Steinberg had something interesting to say: she lamented the obvious lack of funds in government coffers and the lack of “incentives for the private sector to come to the party”.
But Steinberg also lamented the repercussions of globalisation. “Because we have integrated economies and markets,” she said, “American culture is becoming stronger and stronger and more dominant. Some people call it the dumbing-down effect. Culture is becoming more standardised throughout the world – from the ubiquitous McDonalds arches that you see wherever you are now, through to what young people listen to on radios.”
Later that day, over a bad Greek salad at the Grahamstown Steers (another ubiquitous American outlet), I had opportunity to think about the dozen or so productions I had already seen. Certainly, there is some fine work playing in Grahamstown this week, but the instances of true brilliance are few, and there is plenty of rubbish in between.
One of the most meaningful productions must certainly be Sello Maake ka Ncube’s Komeng. While uninterestingly set and cocked up in its first performance, Komeng shows a break with the traditional view of African manhood that we’ve come to accept. In a comfortable township home four friends conduct their social life in a plot that is fraught with pressure, revelation and guilt. It’s about moments of reckoning, when macho exteriors erode, when status symbols like cellphones, cars and drugs become sublimated and the real people behind the masks begin to shine through.
Of note is the performance by the diminutive Kholofelo Kola, who plays the coke-sniffing, car-hijacking bachelor Zero. Such villains may be appearing with regularity now – but Ka Ncube has gone the whole hog in his attempt to strip away some of the ambivalence present in depictions of criminal-types such as those of, say, Yizo Yizo.
Komeng (coming soon to Johannesburg’s Market Theatre) offers hope that mainstream South African culture can take a passionate, critical look at its own materialist obsessions. Its big failing, however, is that it takes itself a little too seriously, and Ka Ncube could benefit from watching a performer like Raymond Matinyane, who returned to the fringe this year with his drag alter ego “Miss Thandi” in tow.
Matinyane has been dragging up for almost a decade now and so his humour is razor-sharp and unabashed. He’s also backed by a host of Dutch benefactors – having lived in The Netherlands for some years – and so his music is surprisingly good. Miss Thandi, of course, doesn’t have to disintegrate into a sobbing mess (like Ka Ncube’s characters) to prove that she’s shrugged off the heavy burdens of being a man.
Relevant issues relating to the construction of South African manhood have raced to the fore, tackled also in Neil McCarthy’s new play, The Great Outdoors. At first, the work presents itself as a dreaded “army buddy” play – the kind in which one gets to discover who dragged who across the enemy lines. But it isn’t. Also, The Great Outdoors isn’t about the culture clash or white guilt.
A tight thriller directed by Barbara Rubin, The Great Outdoors is located in the upper-middle-class, white echelon of South Africa. It’s about white men who, while trying not to regard their wives as chattels, are finding it hard not to do the same with the country’s black people.
On a quiet suburban road a car salesman knocks over a squatter-camp resident and the drama is built around the repurcussions of this event.
These are but a few examples of work that have appeared at an arts festival dominated, this year at least, by men. Men, like Pieter-Dirk Uys, who have satirised women; men, like Greig Coetzee and Deon Opperman, who’ve celebrated the sexuality of women in plays with suspect titles like Breasts and Whore.
Next year, perhaps, the women will find the space to celebrate themselves.