Sweet sounds and notable achievements have arisen from the three pioneering initiatives — the Field Band Foundation, the Buskaid Soweto String Project and the Co-Opera Company East London Guild — nominated for the Arts & Culture Trust’s (ACT) Best Practice Project Award for 2002.
The Field Band Foundation (FBF) walked away with the award. Operating in five provinces with at least 15 bands and 2 400 young players, the FBF is a far-flung and ambitious initiative. Since its inception four years ago, this Section 21 company has helped fill the gap left by the removal of music from state school curricula.
This formula has drawn burgeoning corporate and international support. Founder sponsor, the PG Group, has been joined by 13 South African corporates, including Nedbank, with backing also from Norway, Ireland and the United States (home of the field band idea).
FBF national director Retha Cilliers says the award is “recognition of the work of the foundation with historically disadvantaged youth, but also it supports the concept of music and dance being a very powerful development tool.
“We work with 2 400 children from 52 townships and 169 schools — it is a big project with many dedicated people and it is special for them to be noticed. We have worked very hard to deliver to our sponsors and to be totally accountable. We also develop youth groups who work towards being totally professional performing groups and it is wonderful for them to be rewarded with recognition.”
The Buskaid Soweto String Project was born 10 years ago after the BBC World Service broadcast an interview focusing on the difficulties of a group of young aspiring classical musicians in Diepkloof, Soweto. In response, Buskaid director-to-be Rosemary Nalden, then living in Britain, rallied more than a hundred of her musical colleagues into massive simultaneous busks at 16 British railway stations in March 1992, raising £6 000 for the South African musicians. Nalden kept up the busking for five years until 1997, when she moved to Johannesburg and established the Buskaid Soweto String Project.
As a performance and teaching academy, the project plays a key role in redressing historical inequalities. There are about 60 students at the custom-built Buskaid school, with senior students benefiting from a ground-breaking teacher-training programme.
In quick time, the project has recorded an impressive list of performances, appearing with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Steven Isserlis and Bernarda Fink, among others, and playing before Nelson Mandela, President Thabo Mbeki and Queen Elizabeth II. Status and publicity aside, these and other appearances have raised between R600 000 and R700 000. Further income for the Buskaid Trust has come from two CDs — A Sowetan Kid’s Christmas and Soweto Dance.
The project took Buskaid students on a 10-day workshop that, says Nalden, forged a sense of community between the 41 students and the 19 senior ensemble/trainee teachers.
The ACT-funded Co-Opera Company East London Guild was born in 1994 to provide a showcase for the operatic talent of the Eastern Cape, an area richly endowed with vocal traditions but less well provided with performance opportunities and spaces.
Inspired by the passion for Mozart and Verdi arias shown by her Xhosa-speaking singing students at Rhodes University, award-winning soprano Gwyneth Lloyd launched the company with a performance in January 1995 of Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors. On the Hogsback stage that night were soloists from the province and a hometown chorus — and in the audience was Eastern Cape MEC for Culture Nosimo Balindlela.
It was Balindlela who urged Lloyd to stage operas written by and produced by Eastern Cape artists, dealing with locally significant topics.
Today the company comprises 16 singers and the Ibali Lomculo Script Committee, which develops and workshops the operas and is wholly made up of singers from the company. Co-Opera stalwarts play major roles in company decision-making and training. In addition, Co-Opera now has resident company status at the Guild Theatre in East London, following many successful joint ventures there — and a fundraiser to help save the venue.
Lloyd believes that the Co-Opera Company East London Guild “makes it possible for good singers to stay at home”. Nonetheless, the company has been engaged by Eurostage to tour The Netherlands in April 2003, giving 23 concerts over a four-week period.
Home or abroad, these three ACT nominees made waves with the soundest of practices in projects of considerable and tangible value.