Performances at this year’s festival ranged from good to middling to downright bad
Riaan Wolmarans
It was very white, it was very Afrikaans and there were more food stalls than there were shows. The Aardklop National Arts Festival took place last weekend in Potchefstroom and while it attracted a massive crowd, with about 83000 tickets sold, it lacked the cosmopolitan feel of festivals like the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.
At Aardklop, bands of big-haired grannies roamed the streets in BMWs, cruising past hordes of local parents (brats in tow), on their way to swoon at the next young male singer with gel in his hair performing in the Huisgenoot tent. There were beer tents aplenty, complete with overweight pop star wannabes churning out Right Said Fred covers.
When the audiences predictably cheered every time a black performer spoke or sang in Afrikaans, I was reminded of Zebulon Dread writing in the Mail & Guardian about the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in April, saying “they would stand awed by this k…r who spoke Afrikaans better than most of them could ever dream of”.
Looking briefly at the line-up, there was plenty to enjoy in Afrikaans and English. Barrie Hough and Lizz Meiring’s Breek is a well-acted teen drama with a moral lesson about facing your past and your demons and carrying on. Marthinus Basson’s Aars!, based on the Greek Oresteia trilogy, is an intricate mix of family murders, corruption, violence, power and death (with excellent performances by Antoinette Kellerman, Jaco Bouwer and Dawid Minnaar), but it left many festival-goers baffled. Gigi van Schalkwyk got skilfully down to the bare essentials in the Afrikaans version of Deon Opperman’s Whore.
In the “theatre project” Play@Risk a team of good actors (including Jana Cillers, who shouldn’t really sing, and Shaluza Max) present a radio show, which is shut down a protest against the oppression of creativity in arts in challenging times. Craig Jackson is perfectly egocentric and manically motivated in the one-man Goya, about the Spanish painter’s life. Dick Talk grabbed its subject by the balls in an amusing manner.
Leora Farber’s mind-blowing arts installation All You Can Be crowned the visual-arts aspect of Aardklop, and the Robert Hodgins retrospective and Andre Venter’s multimedia show also drew the crowds. Choreographer Len Coetzer thrilled with Vlees, and Tango del Fuego (Marthinus Basson again) was another favourite in the dance and movement category.
With good comes middling and bad, though. Got It Maid! is a Madam and Eve-type farce about confused identities in the Rainbow Nation entertaining, but it’s been done so many times.
+Positive People, a “black comedy” (or rather, bland comedy) about HIV/Aids, suffered greatly because of amateurish acting. Outopsie, a “horror cabaret” set in a hospital, was simply a horror.
Dread also said the Klein Karoo festival had “advanced little beyond the mundane middle-class mediocrity that personifies the Afrikaner and his view of the arts”. This may ring true for Aardklop also, if seen from a critical outsider’s point of view.
But those who fit comfortably into the Afrikaans-speaking family groups and gangs of inebriated students wouldn’t give a damn about such a statement. They had a ball, dashing between the beer tents, fleamarket (it must surely be illegal to sell so many kitsch things in one place) and the swelteringly hot school halls housing the performances. So it’s not that Aardklop was unenjoyable. It’s just that it often seemed like a really, really big church bazaar.