The South African Women’s Arts Festival could have done with a little more humour and less exclusivity
Thebe Mabanga
It was not so much art with feminine chic but rather art with feminine grit as vain plain Janes, poets and prancers came out to play at the fifth offering of the South African Women’s Arts Festival, held over five days at Durban’s Playhouse Theatre.
An unnerving feature of the work presented at the festival was that hard as they may try to amuse and entertain, the artists ended up invariably gravitating towards the themes of victimisation and suppression of women, and instead left an impression that it is hard to celebrate womanhood without first wallowing in self-pity.
Festival director Anriette Chorn said they did not get proposals for genres like stand-up comedy. So from what they received they sought to strike a balance between serious and lighthearted issues. They then selected work from the country’s major centres to retain a national outlook. The first part of the task was rather subjective and the need for balance made the second difficult. But the organisers performed both tasks well.
From the host province came an abstract two-woman piece featuring Wendy Nell and the amiable Chantal Snyman. Women of Mud was about a relationship between two friends. The two employ rudimentary storytelling methods of mime and caricature to depict a fairy tale steeped in mystery and an endless sense of fascination.
The Cape Comedy Collective brought humour to the drama programme in Insignificant Others, a piece that stars aspiring stand-up comedian Anthea Carolus. Like her inspiration Marc Lottering in From The Cape Flats with Love, Carolus depicts with wit and rather limited accent mastery a range of characters encountered by a plain Jane who longs to look like a Cosmopolitan cover girl.
From the liposuction master and surgeon Dr Zhukov and Oprah “Remembering your spirit” Winfrey, to a psychologist and blues singer, Carolus recalls her time as a drama teacher in Port Elizabeth after completing a speech and drama degree in Cape Town. This prepared her well for her career as an actress and writer, something she did not consider herself to be until she and Shelley Barry sat down to write and stage this witty gem.
To round off the drama section the Sibikwa Players from Gauteng’s East Rand took a look at child abuse in a production that unfolds with a grim and macabre backdrop and where the mood swings from gut-wrenching as childhood innocence disappears to sombre with recitals of TS Eliot’s Murder in A Cathedral and Euripidis’s Mardeas.
Behind Closed Doors was conceptualised by Sibikwa’s creative director and fiery cultural activist, Phyllis Klotz, who says she had to “come out of retirement” at the beginning of the year.
Klotz’s radicalism has not been doused seven years into democracy (one finally gets to use that phrase). She feels the government has not planned properly in their attempts to rescue a troubled sector.
In a paper presented at a festival conference, Women as Entrepreneurs, Klotz called for a paradigm shift in aesthetic conception noting “we need to be making plays that appeal to the black urban youth and the majority of future audiences in this country”.
Well, Carolus is certainly doing her bit. Insignificant Others uses music from performers such as Destiny’s Child and Eminem and lyrics from Toni Braxton. No Mellisa Ethridge or Sheryl Crow.
Klotz also told delegates the arts have always been about taking risks. In the old days the risk was political. Now the risk is a creative one, where the government tells outfits like Sibikwa to find private sector funding. The problem is that the private sector will not touch works that deal with issues such as Aids and township life. “They want us to make theatre that is as bland as McDonald’s hamburgers,” is how Klotz puts it.
Dance, that medium of falling bodies, remains a defining feature of any multi-discipline arts festival. In Durban the suffering of women was again highlighted in works like Pravinka Janki’s The Long Red Road and Sifiso Kweyama’s Recognition: An Everywoman’s Story.
Which is why we celebrate Constance Kau for advising women to just be graceful, tender and loving beings in the very accessible dance piece ‘Cause I’m a Woman. If she had used a narrative for the piece she could casually point out how “you will die of stress trying to pursue a True Love magazine definition of happiness”.
Finally the long awaited Strings from Portia Mashego and Gladys Agulhas premiered and proved to be good but not mind-blowing.
Mashego, the young girl who pranced around merrily with an afro in Vincent Mantsoe’s Gula Matari and put on a doek to give us My Father: My Mum’s Man, has matured into a sprightly and petite 27-year-old. She pointed out that, as a measurement of the extent to which the festival has grown, My Mum’s Man premiered there three years ago and this year was staged in London as part of Celebrate South Africa month.
You go girls.