The sixth Spier Summer Arts Festival starts this week. Paul Boekkooi gives an overview of this unique event
The Spier Estate setting just outside Stellenbosch certainly is breathtakingly beautiful. While all the major arts festivals run by the Rainbow Nation are compressed events lasting a maximum of some seven or eight days, Spier’s is in a different league.
Spier has evolved through experimentation at times dangerously so but mainly aiming to arrive at a balanced, holistic whole reflecting a kind of cross-cultural dynamic one would find only in a handful of countries worldwide.
For Delecia Forbes, the newly appointed Spier Arts Trust director, it’s partly a period of consolidation but also one of innovation that will give the 2001/02 festival a different profile. Continuing fixed events, for one, is the opera season that will, according to Forbes, reflect a “uniquely South African aesthetic”.
Added to this is a more streamlined approach to accommodate fun-filled family entertainment during the festive season, while during February and March a series of more challenging theatrical and dance productions will be staged.
One glance over the full programme puts one directly in touch with idealistic aims that had to be nurtured, thought through and the costs calculated before they could be realised. New is a second venue, named Die Werf at Spier, where family and community shows will be staged.
Apart from this, the biggest quantum leap they’ve achieved is to accommodate crafts and the visual arts throughout the festival. The Spier craft expo, entitled “A Spirit of Place”, will open with a ceremonial switching on of the Christmas lights on December 5 and will run through December and January. Apart from exhibitions, it will include interactive workshops, demonstrations, master classes and retreats, while the planned pilot programme focuses on working with textiles, fibre (including papermaking), recycled materials, clay and beadwork.
Honouring sculpture is another joyful development. The Spier Outdoor Sculpture Biennial, in conjunction with the Jan Marais Nature Reserve in Stellenbosch, is on view from January to March under the banner “Public Eye”. It is due to extend national and international focus on Spier and the Western Cape. About 10 sculptors’ proposals have been chosen and they’ll be contracted to create them on site from mid-November up to the second week in January when the exhibition opens.
While the events in the past were all held on the stage of the amphitheatre, this space is now surrounded by a festival district. The performing arts still reflect the heartbeat of Spier and visitors with eclectic tastes and a share of an inheritance to spend should take up residence there.
The details
All performances at the Spier Summer Arst Festival start at 8.30pm. Book at Computicket. Enquiries on Tel: (021) 809 1165.