Once upon a time the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown was the chief cultural event of the year. Arts movers-and-shakers from all over gathered, before a sizeable and appreciative audience, to parade wares, exchange sparks and create a rich cultural synergy that fuelled the year following.
This year the festival — shorn of its former name sponsor, Standard Bank — has a sadly tepid aspect, rather like the dismal bath water temperature in at least one leading hotel. (Of course, the bank has remained this year’s chief contributor amid a shaky line-up of new donors.) Because of uncertainty about funding, perhaps, and a less robust marketing build-up than usual, the number of upcountry visitors is distinctly down.
Increasingly, Africa’s biggest festival feels like a regional event, the programme filled out with Eastern Cape offerings of doubtful professional currency, with technical back-up tottering and a nagging sense that the locals in this deeply depressed part of the country are eager, chiefly, to wring a buck out of the dwindling band of festinos. (The traffic cops, for instance, are having a fest of their own, road-blocking and ticketing as if there was no tomorrow — and thus swelling the suspiciously low local municipal coffers.)
The theatre programme is chockful of revivals — Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams and vintage Paul Slabolepszy animate the main programme –and increasingly the focus of vital cultural energy seems to be on the borderlines between dance, music and physical theatre. PJ Sabbagha’s The Double Room, for instance, is a gut-wrenching multimedia exploration in dance, performance, text and computer animation of one man’s experience of living with HIV/Aids — an exploration deeply uplifting in its surprising, poetic, upsetting assertion of the complex joy of being alive.
Sabbagha’s mediation of experience through physique — chiefly, the brooding Brandoesque presence of dancer Lanon Prigge — highlights one intriguing theme of this festival: a searching critique in various media of the body, its elations and its discontents, particularly as a site of gender mapping and its associated politics. Carol Brown’s exhibition Male Order is a fascinating compilation of local representations in painting and sculpture of the male body, from Pierneef to Andrew Verster, highlighting the changing notions of masculinity — and bodily integrity –in the richly contested, ambi-sexual climate of the 2000s.
Equally compelling in a different medium is the Craig Freimond/Jamie Bartlett collaboration Everbody, a one-man play in which today’s embattled middle-aged white hetro male revisits, with painful comedy, the myriad meanings of his softening, shifting, socially queasy physique. What emerges in these questing investigations is a certain pathos, and a newly constituted dignity, of what it is, now, to be (as DH Lawrence put it) a man alive in post-feminist times.
Changing — and newly affirmative — representations of womanhood in Africa are the subject of Beading My Soul, writer-director Andrea Dondolo’s delightful, engaging play that revitalises story-telling traditions by weaving a set of tales, beadlike, around the central narrative strand of a rural woman’s high aspirations — and bruising experience. A touch didactic in its conclusions, Beading My Soul wonderfully animates local oral conventions, even as it deconstructs entrapping notions of the traditional black female.
Similarly searching in both its narrative excitements and its gendering enquiries is Rajesh Gopie’s marvellous, magical epic drama The Coolie Odyssey, which tells the story over three generations of a Hindu family’s traumatic voyage from Victorian India to colonial Natal.
The play registers changing cultural patterns through the template of Hindu ritual and belief, triumphantly demonstrating how our artistic experience may begin with the local and specific, but concludes by transcending, and reconstituting, difference. Black, Indian and Anglo rediscover themselves, and each other, in a cultural space uniquely South African. (In the one-hander Chilli Boy, white boy Matthew Ribnick actually wants to be Indian — a parodic reflection on my topic.)
With another day to go, it would seem Grahamstown 2002, straightened and cowed as it may be, continues to reflect and refract vital cultural issues. Yet on current showing, unless a major injection of vision, cash — and hot water — is forthcoming, the festival will continue to peter out, in terms of audience support, of its own accord. Given the rich cultural experiences on offer, this would be a great loss — and not only for the traffic cops, food-stall hucksters and informal parking attendants of this once-and-future frontier city.