If it’s late June, it must be Grahamstown, that site synonymous with — and eponymous for — the country’s largest and longest-running arts festival.
Place and time are the same this year, but for the first time in almost two decades the event does not bear the name of long-time title sponsor Standard Bank. Instead, there is a tripartite alliance behind the new-look National Arts Festival, with some local help for good measure. The Eastern Cape government, the National Arts Council and Standard Bank have put up the money, with support from the Shamwari Game Reserve, to stage this year’s cultural shindig, from June 29 to July 6.
This new set-up heralds other changes. Leaner than before, the festival has been trimmed to eight days from the standard 11. Mainstream and fringe line-ups are refreshingly easier to navigate than in the past; some would say they are disturbingly shallow.
As a veteran of 11 Grahamstowns, I don’t view this apparent depletion as a necessarily bad thing. Seized by festival fever, peer pressure and guilt-stricken arts consciences, festival-goers typically would try to see too much, leading to physical and metal enervation.
There is less chance of cultural overload this time round. Certainly, the option of a more considered festival experience is an attractive one; in some of the mammoth events of the mid-1990s, the feeling was rather of arts lovers let loose in the manner of children in a chocolate shop, gorging and disgorging almost immediately in order to make room for the next slab.
It is with a particular Slab that I’d like to begin this subjective view of the festival’s potential highlights. He may have been seduced by money-spinners — or, more probably, been forced by the parlous and unrewarding nature of the arts scene into penning commercial hits — but Paul Slabolepszy remains one of the country’s finest playwrights. An early, classic Slab work opens on day one: Mooi Street Moves, a paean to ordinary people attempting to cope with extraordinary change.
In this new staging, director Mncedisi Baldwin Shabangu is billed as breathing new vigour into the script. However it plays on stage, one thing is certain: it will be an unalloyed pleasure to witness Slabolepszy’s deeply humanitarian instincts at work as well as his remarkable ability to characterise through dialogue.
Another stalwart of South African theatre, John Kani, makes his debut as a playwright with Nothing but the Truth, in which he co-stars with Pamela Nomvete and Dambisa Kente. Kani is a protean figure on the national arts scene: actor, National Arts Council chairperson, Market Theatre chief and now writer. This premiere sees Kani in one of his less controversial personae, enabling critics of Kani the cultural politician to lay aside their qualms for 135 minutes of what bids fair to be an absorbing exploration of exile and homecoming, reality and rationalising fictions.
In the new play by Rajesh Gopie, The Coolie Odyssey, the arts have a riposte to Mbongeni Ngema’s hate-inciting songs directed against Indians (that is not to forget the nationalities he has targeted in other songs). Gopie’s work moves from 1890 to 1947 to the present, all the while grappling with questions of alienation and belonging. While it may be convenient, even glib, to impose an anti-Ngema thrust on this play, it is a synchronous antidote to the demagoguery of a once great playwright.
Growing as a fest within the fest, the New Music Indaba (NMI) offers the tantalising Khuthazo!/Shout! at 2pm in the cathedral on 29 June. A juggernaut of choral works, the bill is topped by the South African premiere of South African-born Stanley Glasser’s The Chameleon and the Lizard, which was to have premiered at last year’s festival.
Also at the NMI, listen out for AMM, the masters of free improvisation whose inimitable sounds bridge pop, jazz and serious music. They play only once, on July 1 at 9.30pm.
If meaningful movement appeals, do not miss The Suit, Boyzie Cekwana’s evocative version of Can Themba’s classic South African short story. Cekwana’s choreography and dancing propel this anguished narrative of fidelity betrayed, from sensual opening moments to wrenching finale, where the promise of love is lost irrevocably.
William Kentridge returns to the festival with his unique blend of media, in an opera, Confessions of Zeno. Together with South African-born, Ireland-based composer Kevin Volans, long-standing co-creators the Handspring Puppet Company and writer Jane Taylor, who adapted the Italo Svevo novel, Kentridge focuses on the European bourgeoisie in the run-up to the World War I. In betting terms, this is a certainty for both initiates and those entranced by earlier Kentridge works in a genre he has made his own.
Last, the film festival, often overlooked amid the welter of live performing arts fare, offers six works by Sergei Eisenstein: Strike, Battleship Potemkin, Ivan the Terrible parts I and II, Alexander Nevsky and Time in the Sun. Effectively an anthology by one of the greatest filmmakers, this mini-fest is one to reel for.
Overall, if the enlightened self-interest that motivates coalitions of arts sponsors is brought to bear on Grahamstown for next year’s festival by other, new partners, we will have a festival to die for. Then all the event needs is to find a better name, because its acronym, NAF, is certainly misleading.