Rob van Vuuren is better known as Twakkie, the little guy with the enormous Viking moustache in the duo called The Most Amazing Show. He hates the correlation, believing that the comedy act’s success hinges on separating his larger-than-life stage persona from his rather diminutive, biological self. With his sidekick Corné, aka Louw Venter, he has ravaged National Arts Festival audiences for three seasons in a row.
The two launch their most ambitious project yet: Corné and Twakkie’s Culture Klap on July 1. Basically, they have formed a rock outfit that will host six of the country’s top new bands, six deejays and madcap comic Bevan Cullinan. All this over six nights on a devoted stage at Rhodes Club in Grahamstown.
Van Vuuren is amazingly calm, given his role as budding live music promoter. ‘We know Corné and Twakkie could have gone through Grahamstown by themselves, but it’s really important to keep the brand cutting edge. Now we have injected a whole new view. It’s not just about combining stand-up comedy and bands. It’s about connecting people to make interesting shit happen.”
It’s a little irksome to hear Van Vuuren describe his artwork as a ‘brand”. It makes the country’s most unique creation since Evita Bezuidenhout seem like a mere advertising ploy.
This story is about what makes the country’s top artists tick. What drives creators, year after year, to churn out meaning at festival time? ‘Corné and Twakkie have always been rock stars, so this is a natural thing for them to do.”
Coming up with groundbreaking ideas is the ‘natural” way for successful entrepreneurs. That’s the clue. It’s natural for Van Vuuren and company to drive a laden bakkie across the Karoo, to Grahamstown, where they’ll camp down in an overcrowded, hired house before taking their ‘brand” to a higher plane.
Artists nationwide are currently involved in similarly arduous pursuits. Onstage at Newtown’s Dance Factory, award-winning choreographer PJ Sabbagha is putting his dancers through their paces. It’s about a week to showtime. The dancers — four of the company of nine who have not yet left for Grahamstown — are rehearsing a section that requires tight synchronicity.
Sabbagha’s company, Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative, has worked with seasoned musician Jennifer Ferguson and digital video artist Nathaniel Stern to create Petra, about ‘our sexual disabilities and our histories as South Africans”.
Sabbagha, this year’s Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner for dance, says: ‘We are looking at the current crisis of HIV and Aids on a social and a personal level.
‘The piece recognises the similarities in experience between HIV and military conscription, and homo-sexuality, in the apartheid era. We explore the way in which personal relationships have been similarly placed under intense scrutiny and interrogation.”
In summary, Sabbagha says Petra is about ‘a relationship between a man [Dawid Minnaar] and a drag queen that is failing sexually. The desire is there but the ability to make contact is not.” He notes that the work is performed in underwear, it begins in the dark rooms of a sex club and ends in a military barracks.
One cannot avoid thinking, here, of the recent hit season of Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom’s Cards. The sex drama, set in a brothel, played to gushing houses at the Market Theatre last month. Like estate agents, Sabbagha and Grootboom have realised something fundamental about current theatre-going tastes: position, position, position. And the underworld of sex and sleaze is flavour of the month.
Grootboom is a Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner for drama and his festival work is called Relativity: Township Stories. There’s something thoroughly unsettling about his take on black society. He revels in what could be called the ‘new ubuntu”. In a phrase: ‘I screw you while you screw me.”
Here’s the official description of Grootboom’s upcoming plot: ‘Kicked out of home by her mother, a daughter falls for an abusive thug. Her father hires a hit man, while in another home a father sodomises his son who is bedding both a woman and her daughter. A serial killer circles in the shadows of this mayhem.”
‘The model for the area is Atteridgeville,” Grootboom says. ‘I don’t think I have an entirely positive take. At the moment I don’t see why I should do positive stuff even though there’s pressure every time.
‘But I celebrate the fact that ideas are contradictory. I always contradict myself. For example, I’ll say living in Soweto is the worst thing in the world. But next time I’ll think it’s the greatest thing. I struggle with this.
‘After the new South Africa came about, people were still trying to deal with the fact that everything is new, everything is equal but they are still living in a place created out of apartheid. Everything has changed but the place has not changed.
‘People who live in the township are so caught up in the township that they cannot get out. Things happen — horrible things. It’s called Relativity because in the township everything is relative. And sometimes people find it difficult to get out.”
Grootboom has written his work with Presley Chweneyagae and has worked with a cast of 16. Gone are the days of solos and duos. The new generation of achievers is working on a large canvas. And the new ideas, in turn, are also big and brash.