opera
Barbara Ludman
Andrew Botha’s take on Rigoletto is so lavish one could almost believe one was back in the bad old days. In the early 1980s Pact staged operas regularly at the Civic Theatre with glorious sets, fabulous costumes and unimpressive voices, except for foreign singers brought in to sing the leads.
There are, however, welcome differences between those productions and Pro Musica Opera’s Rigoletto, the second in its four-opera Verdi season. The voices in this all-local cast are, mostly, wonderful principals and bit players alike, especially the men.
Hans van Heerden’s Rigoletto should carry a trademark; according to the programme, he’s sung the role of the duke’s jester 105 times. It’s the best portrayal of this tortured, multi-layered soul I’ve seen anywhere sung superbly, acted convincingly something rare in opera, where characters are overdrawn and performers more singer than actor.
Singers in small parts are a pleasure to watch and to hear: Bongani Vilakazi gives an excellent Sparafucile, the professional killer; and one hopes Patrick Shabalala, who is the outraged father, Count Monterone, will appear in future in roles that give him more to do.
Anina Wasserman’s Gilda is small and pretty, and her voice small and lovely. Alas, that’s not enough, especially in a cast that includes Sibongile Khumalo, who sings Maddalena, the assassin’s sister. Khumalo is what opera is about: glorious voice, extraordinary presence, good acting.
Opera is also about spectacle and here, despite a confusing Act I and some of the most ham-fisted directing you’ll ever see outside amateur night, Botha scores by moving the action from 16th century Mantua to modern-day Johannesburg, and taking it over the top. It works for this tale of a duke who uses his position to seduce every woman he encounters, including the young daughter of his jester, whose revenge rebounds upon the poor fellow.
Botha’s duke is a drug baron who holds court in a mansion populated by a nightmare assortment of ravers, showgirls, thieves, killers, leather boys and a drag queen with fuzzy green shorts and a horrifying headdress. People dance, snuggle up, snort cocaine and play with guns or knives.
Botha is no Quentin Tarantino he really shouldn’t expect people to sing while pointing a gun at arm’s length for a good three or four minutes; surely an assassin can find something to do besides play with his knife for two acts; and rather more serious Sidwill Hartman, as the duke, should have been offered more creative business than striding around the stage in super-macho fashion or surveying the scene with his arms folded across his leather jacket.
Never mind Botha has brought fun back into opera and that’s what counts.
The details
The Pro Musica Opera production of Verdi’s Rigoletto is on at the Civic Theatre, Braamfontein, until July 28. Book at Ticketweb. Tel: (011) 403 3409
@Reality gets reel lifeThe Encounters film festival elevates the filming of actuality to a fine art
Neil Sonnekus
The best thing to have come out of the South African film industry in the past few years is without a doubt its documentaries. This is partially because a few technicians and directors who used to produce some pretty awful anti-apartheid news movies have now matured into fully rounded filmmakers.
Former news cameraman Craig Matthews, co-director of Ochre and Water, and Lindy Wilson, director of The Guguletu Seven, instantly spring to mind as makers of world-class material.
The opening-up of our society has allowed a new generation of filmmakers to emerge. People like Robert de Mezieres, who co-directed Shooting Bokkie, and Luiz de Barros, who made Metamorphosis, are also in a class of their own.
It is to their advantage that documentary filmmakers don’t have to deal with feature film producers. And as Nodi Murphy, co-director of the Encounters South African International Documentary Festival (Encounters III), says: “Documentaries are so much cheaper to make.
“We don’t make features, love, because in my opinion we’re still trying to make like America. Take the Australian film Strictly Ballroom. It probably has 100 Australian jokes in it that we don’t even get, and then 50 jokes for the rest of the world.
“We have Leon Schuster who only makes jokes for a section of our society and maybe the Germans. We must first like ourselves before we can make features of any substance.”
The opening of South African society has also meant a certain pragmatic receptivity towards the needs of the rest of the world’s markets. One reality is that a broader spectrum of people cares more for that unique selling proposition we have, our wildlife and its conservation, than our politics. Yet at least two local films have managed to keep a balance between that and exploring new global issues in unique combinations.
The Great Dance and Ochre and Water deal with how the original inhabitants of South Africa and northern Namibia, the San and Himba, are being threatened by modern development.
The former has won numerous international prizes and it’s worth noting that both films were generated by a foreign producer, Dutch dynamo Ellen Windemuth.
Encounters shares a loose association with a similar festival in Nyon, Switzerland. Part of that association is to bring out foreign directors and producers to share their skills in the laboratory section of the festival. This has led to commissions by e.tv, which has now become a full media partner of the festival. This year there will be 44 films, of which about a third are local, and two audience prizes.
Asked what criteria are used in the selection process, Murphy says: “We have no particular theme in mind. We look at other festivals. We solicited 150 tapes, another 150 were just sent to us.
“As we look, so themes begin to manifest themselves. Apart from its subject matter, Maximum Penalty, about the Danish communist leader Arne Munch-Petersen who disappeared into the Soviet camps, was selected because of its use of graphics in its editing style.
“One Day in September, which is about the 1972 Olympics and the havoc the Palestinian Black September caused, was important because it was about media.
“The only underlying theme to this year’s festival is that the films are made by people who are serious documentary makers. They are not journalist or editors or producers, but filmmakers.”
Judging by its material alone, Encounters III should be another roaring success.
The details
The Encounters South African International Documentary Festival is on in Cape Town at Cinema Nouveau, V&A Waterfront, from July 22 to 31 and in Johannesburg at Cinema Nouveau, Rosebank Mall, from August 3 to 9. Book at Computicket.
@Films to look out for
Shooting Bokkie: A bokkie is a juvenile drug runner and assassin who does so because if he gets caught he’ll only get a maximum of five years’ jail sentence. In this highly original doccie the age-old journalistic question arises: is it morally acceptable to film someone being killed when you can stop it?
The Great Dance: Three San hunters undertake what is probably their last great hunt. It has won international prizes, even doing well against mega-projects like Walking With Dinosaurs. Directors Damon and Craig Foster will be present at the festival.
Metamorphosis: The story of Granny Lee, a coloured man who became the whitest, oldest and most outrageous disco queen in the Seventies and Eighties. Impeccably directed by Luiz de Barros and shot by Robert Malpage.
Ochre and Water: A beautifully shot, paced and scored story of how the Himba are opposing their government’s plans to build a dam on their ancestral sites in northern Nambia.
The Guguletu Seven: Though it might sound like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission documentary, it is much more than that. It becomes a detective story about our past, almost a thriller, and a masterly study in how to turn hard facts into poetic truths about our past. Beautifully controlled, it is co-shot by Clifford Bestell, whose Cage of Dreams about Cape Flats criminals is also showing at the festival.
In the Shadow of a Saint: Further north but still on the continent, there is the story of executed Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa’s son trying to bury his father, both literally and figuratively. First World-reared, Ken Wiwa lives in Canada and is married to a white woman. It’s a touching portrait of both the man, his son and their people.
Cunnamulla: About 800km west of Brisbane in the Australian outback, you have never come across such a collection of dry, deluded and dreamy characters in your life. There is no voice over, simply a single, subtitled line to tell us what each character is about. Actually, what makes these characters so endearing is that you’ll find them in any small town in the middle of nowhere.
Carlos Cardoso: An Independent Spirit: A celebration of the slain Mozambican journalist as an icon of press freedom in Southern Africa. Rehad Desai’s film draws largely on Cardoso’s writings and attempts to chronicle a distinguished contribution that was ended when Cardoso was assassinated late last year.
The White Tribe: Black “radical” social commentator Darcus Howe takes a look at that tribe of savage barbarians, the modern British, and comes to some startling and sympathetic conclusions about them. It’s a wonderful inversion of a look at the natives. Howe will be present at the festival.
The Making of a New Empire: The story of Chechen leader Khoz-Ahmed Koukhaev, escaped convict, war hero, media manager, mystic visionary and “controller of the flow of the planet’s largest oil reserves”. Brilliantly shot in the rubble that is Grozny, it is a frightening look at the beauty of power and the darkest hell that is war. Its producer Jan Heijs will also be present at the festival.
@Goodbye Mr Lucky
He was a blues giant whose raw voice and singular guitar bridged generations
John lee hooker
In all the long history of the blues, there has been no figure more singular than John Lee Hooker, who died recently in his sleep aged 83.
Where other singers rhymed, he sang in blank verse; where other guitarists might skip through the changes, he would play entire songs on one or two chords; and where other blues veterans were fortunate to be rediscovered once, he bounced repeatedly from obscurity or semi-retirement back into the limelight.
For most African-American musicians of Hooker’s generation, to title an album Mr Lucky would be to exercise at least a little irony, but he did enjoy more strokes of good fortune than usually come a bluesman’s way.
That he could draw about him, even in old age, a crowd of admiring fellow musicians and would-be collaborators was largely due to the hypnotic effect of his music, to the mantra-like chanting over the relentlessly repetitive beat of guitar and foot, which seemed to absorb listeners and accompanists alike into a huge heartbeat.
Those qualities were evident in his first hit, Boogie Chillen (1948), an apparently impromptu synthesis of spoken narrative and sung verses with abrupt gear-changes on the guitar. Such structural wilfulness was not uncommon among the blues musicians of the 1920s and 1930s, but for much of his life Hooker was exceptional “the last”, Ry Cooder called him, “of those unstructured, free players”. Cooder, together with Van Morrison, Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt and other musicians, helped Hooker assert his primacy among the senior bluesmen of the late 1980s and 1990s.
When he started his recording career, about 40 years earlier, he was on his own, though so popular did he become after the success of Boogie Chillen that he briefly turned into a multiple personality, recording for half a dozen labels under as many pseudonyms: Texas Slim, Delta John, Johnny Williams, Birmingham Sam & His Magic Guitar. “At that time,” he would recall, “I began to believe in myself. I knew, then, I was in a field of my own.”
Hooker was based in Detroit, where he had moved in 1943, working during the day as a janitor at Dodge Motors or Comco Steel and at night playing in the black clubs around Hastings Street. Never much given to reminiscence, he managed to preserve a good deal of vagueness about his early life, whether in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he was born into a family of 11 children, or in Memphis and Cincinnati, where he spent periods in his teens.
In Clarksdale, his stepfather taught him some things on guitar, including the open-G tuning he would employ to such resonant effect, and what would become one of his favourite songs, When My First Wife Quit Me. He also listened attentively to the obscure Mississippi bluesman Tony Hollins, from whom he derived one of his early successes, Crawling King Snake, though most of his highly personal conception of blues singing and playing appears to have come from within.
I’m in the Mood, a characteristically skewed reconstruction of the pop song I’m in the Mood For Love, gave Hooker another hit in 1951, but the day of the solo bluesman was passing and when he signed with a new label, the Chicago-based Vee Jay Records, in 1955, he began to work with small backing groups.
The other musicians flattened his more baroque rhythmic contours and some of the hectic excitement was lost, but the success of Dimples (1956) proved the change of setting to have been a commercially astute move.
While maintaining his name in the ghetto record stores, he also, exceptionally, developed a parallel career as a folk-blues artist, playing without amplification and recalling songs from an earlier, more rural era of the blues. “I have created about three fields,” he would say proudly. “A folk field, a blues field and a jump field for the kids. If it was necessary, I could do hillbilly stuff.”
Such dexterity enabled Hooker, in the early 1960s both to perform at the Newport folk festival and to have a hit in the rhythm’n’blues chart with Boom Boom, which even entered the British Top 20 in 1964 and made possible a succession of British tours. He had first visited Europe with the first of the American folk-blues festival troupes in 1962.
By the late 1960s, the folk-blues bubble had burst, and the music business and its market had other preoccupations. Hooker, whose audiences were now almost entirely white, responded with songs about the Vietnam war and miniskirts. In the 1970s he became a blues magnet, attracting collaborators such as the United States band Canned Heat and his longtime admirer Van Morrison, who joined him in stream-of-consciousness raps like Never Get Out of These Blues Alive.
By the end of the decade, however, Hooker seemed to have wearied of touring and recording, and when the near silence prolonged itself through the 1980s, most blues enthusiasts assumed he had vanished into retirement.
It was another admirer half his age, the guitarist Roy Rogers, who, with Hooker’s manager Mike Kappus, discovered the formula to reactivate the sleeping giant, pairing him with artists as different from him, and each other, as the young bluesman Robert Cray, the Hispanic rock band Los Lobos, and the bluesy singer Bonnie Raitt, who remade I’m in the Mood with him as a steamily erotic duet.
The result, The Healer (1989), became the bestselling album in blues history, to be followed by Mr Lucky (1991), which repeated the twinning format with Cooder, Morrison and Keith Richards.
If there was less of Hooker’s self-willed guitar to be heard, the years seemed to have added potency to his other resource, the dark, sombre instrument of his voice “That deep, well-like sound,” Cooder called it, while for Raitt it was “one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard”.
By now as nearly a household name as a blues artist is ever permitted to be, Hooker was sought by film-makers to add an indigo shade to their soundtracks, and by advertisers to fix his stamp upon brands such as ICI, Martell brandy, Foster’s lager and, of course, Lee jeans. He even exploited himself, opening a music club in San Francisco, the Boom Boom Room.
Enjoying his prosperity, Hooker now worked only when he chose, but when he did sit down on a stage with his guitar he wove much of his old spell. Though he had been lauded in the 1970s as a matchless exponent of the boogie beat one of the most successful of his scores of albums was titled Endless Boogie he cared more about telling a story.
“Every song I sing,” he said, “is something that happened to my life or somebody else’s life in this world. You might lose your money or your car, or can’t pay the rent every person has had these heartaches and tribulations. That’s why everybody digs the blues. When I sing these songs I feel them down deep and reach you down deep”.
Hooker is survived by his fourth wife, Millie, and six children from his previous marriages, including musicians Zakiya and Robert.
Tony Russell
John Lee Hooker, blues musician, born August 22 1917, died June 21 2001