So as not to miss the last days of this year’s National Arts Festival, I tried to edge into the only parking space left in Grahamstown. Some performers were blocking the access, mother waltzing with a silver cup, her daughter kissing a beam with clockfaces on it and her husband in his vest squashing beercans (Castle). Klonkies from the plaas were jitterbugging in the back of their bakkie.
Street theatre, I thought — an opening challenge to the critic even before I had sorted my way to which venue for what. But wrong: they had just come out tops in the farmer’s show, which carries on regardless meanwhile. Their four exhausted angoras — the prize-winners were intrigued.
For eight days a year (as it now is) the country’s biggest festival continues, despite the dire rumours of slashed sponsorship and short rations. There still were all of the following to report on: a Dance Festival, a Theatre Festival (dominating the main programme and fringe), an Art Festival (led by genial Andrew Verster), a Film Festival, a Jazz Festival, a New Music Festival, an Opera Festival, a Children’s Arts Festival, a Winter School (organised by Ingrid de Kok, who on the side won the Dalro poetry prize), and then the Wordfest. In other words, you may still hunker down without even changing seats to experience more than anyone can absorb on any particular day, for minuscule fees, and 10 times over.
This I tested, for example, at the New Music Indaba, held at no less than the Beethoven Room of the Rhodes Music School. There over the next seven hours thoughtful Michael Blake, the director, with a parade of performers more or less crammed me with what has happened in music since Tchaikovsky (and more than one gets to hear on SAfm in a year). From Grethe Nöthling of Pretoria on her Bösendorfer with Stefans Grové to Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph, to the Dutch Insomnio ensemble playing Rüdiger Meyer (world premiere), to the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet believe it or not, with a world premiere of Jürgen Brauninger of Durban’s piece for them (one movement was called iso-kNepad, sounding like a machine-gun fusillade …). Elated and updated, I missed their last day, which consisted entirely of world premieres of work written during the week’s workshops.
Then I did a trawl through one-men shows. Once there was a phenomenon called poor theatre, which in South Africa produced immortal works like Sizwe Bansi Is Dead. Nowadays less-is-more turns out similar stark pieces, with performers often having little other than their own bodies to display. Jamie Bartlett’s Everybody epitomises the trend — the lone lad pumping up before one, with an array of consumer goods on hand, each sponsor having to be slyly mentioned and duly thanked. Then the reliable Peter Hayes in The Fence, about a gay hate murder, that implies each and every other hate crime — with a ring, a necklace.
Then the Green Mamba comedians (Ben Voss and John van de Ruit), in the old Drill Hall, where Saartjie Baartman first was turned into an act (in 1889). They took on just about everything that happened thereafter, with just two chairs. Such, it seems, are the children of Pieter-Dirk Uys, still on the road with his admirable safe-sex lecture called Foreign Aids.
Another lone male’s story was harder to take to: Duma Kumalo’s account, in person, of how he was falsely sentenced to hang as one of the Sharpeville Six in the bad old black-and-white days. Too much chain-smoking and chain-coughing and mumbling on death row, I’d say, when a professional could have really taken us by the throat. But in this day and age that not a hint of sympathy may be shown for their victim, who got killed after all, even if Kumalo did not do the deed, I found distressing. The production of He Left Quietly was thus exploitative and morally unacceptable.
So, from those mere examples, I deduce that rumours of the festival’s near-demise are greatly exaggerated. Next year you will still have to make complicated choices, starting with Valpré for pure audience stamina, or is it Valvita? Choose whichever comes in as a sponsor.