To profess to be the ‘national” festival for the arts is quite a claim to maintain and live up to. South Africa is still grappling with the notion of a national identity, a debate that seems increasingly to thrust itself to the fore as an ambitious and hopeful country faces down its societal challenges.
In what sense then is the annual festival in Grahamstown national? Certainly, it is by far the most varied artistically, including a literary and even a religious-music festival. It is also the biggest in terms of the number of events, though no longer so in ticket sales. And it draws artists from across the country. But that’s the same as saying I’m a national because I have citizenship. Is this sufficient to define it as the ‘national” event? Is this all we mean by and expect from such an appellation? After all, the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees carries the same tag.
It’s a shrewd move. The cash injections festivals bring to local economies mean many communities want a chance to dance on the bandwagon. What Grahamstown has is know-how and intellectual property, particularly in the personage of Lynette Marais, the executive director and stalwart whose Herculean efforts have kept the event going and earned it its long-standing reputation.
The town does not have the greatest infrastructure. The accommodations are infamous, the seating makeshift, and the technical equipment mostly hired. Its position is therefore hardly entrenched and there’s no room for complacency.
Aware of this, the Eastern Cape government quickly stepped up to the plate and this year will match Standard Bank’s considerable sponsorship, a commitment they will need to renew and improve upon. The National Arts Council is also supportive of the event’s national status. It has doubled its direct contribution to R2-million and, having at last, it seems, seen the light, has put the money up in advance.
When the festival started, it was the only major arts event in the country. In the past decade, a plethora of performing- arts festivals have sprung up. These tend to focus on a single art form or express either a regional or a specific identity, such as the gay Pink Loerie Carnival or Die Suid-Ooster Fees, which draws largely on the coloured community in the Cape. Surprisingly, there is no significant festival that primarily articulates the work of contemporary black artists or, for that matter, African heritage. The National Arts Festival has by far the most black artists. On the fringe programme, gradually, more works are performed in African languages, in part at least.
National Arts Festival board member Paul Bannister, astutely, believes that ‘one should see the other festivals as complementary not competitive; more collaboration is needed”. National to him means, ‘the best of the best gets to come”. The festival will need financial muscle if it is to lure first-class acts. Several other festivals, especially on the fringe, are proving much more lucrative for producers.
To differentiate itself, National Arts Festival radio adverts are running with the line this year that it’s the arts festival with international recognition. But part of the equation for international recognition requires that not only tourists attend but that artists from abroad apply to perform. There is hardly any presence from elsewhere in Africa — an Ethiopian dance group, a play about Sudanese refugees living in South Africa.
Sibongile Khumalo, National Arts Festival committee chairperson, recognises this as a deficiency that needs to be rectified: ‘It doesn’t make sense when South Africa is a leading light in so many areas on the continent.”
This year’s opening ceremony is at the Stadium Mickey Vili in Joza. Khumalo sees this as ‘a vote of confidence, an important statement by the Eastern Cape government that they are serious about this event”.
Participating artists come from all over South Africa. But, as a national event, it is even more important that the festival pulls its audience from the far corners of the country. What will attract them is a major challenge facing the National Arts Festival.
What’s on at the main festival
Sibongile Khumalo, chairing the National Arts Festival committee for the first time, puts it this way: ‘It is a balancing act …What is qualitative may not be accessible … And what has entertainment value is not always the kind of art that enhances the quality of life.”
Board member Paul Bannister says that although ‘popular work is a dimension that needs to be accommodated, by the same token we must not disregard the more classical and esoteric”. The festival is still bent on showing work that is on ‘the cutting edge”, and maintaining its ‘diversity of art forms”, he says.
A look at the main programme bears out his sentiments, particularly in dance, which includes Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, Acty Tang’s Chaste based on Oscar Wilde’s Salome, and Jazz art/Magnet Theatre’s contemporary dance production about slavery, Cargo. You’ll have to go to the fringe, however, to see Athena Mazarakis mapping her body in Coming To or another of this year’s FNB Dance Umbrella sensations, 6 Minutes.
The most active theatres in the country premiere their star works here. The Baxter has brought Edward Albee’s modern masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Lara Foot Newton’s Reach. The Market presents Craig Higginson’s Dream of the Dog and the true Story of an African Choir, about a group of young black choristers who were marooned in England. Brett Bailey returns with Orfeus, a site-specific work performed at the old quarry. Apart for the State Theatre, which is staging Paul Grootboom’s Interacial, other highly subsidised state behemoths are a negligible presence.
Exhibition highlights include photographers Pieter Hugo, with trenchant portraits from Messina, and David Goldblatt’s penetrating documental, Some Afrikaners Revisited. Refreshing is The Caring Namibian Man, compiled from a project that involved distributing 100 disposable cameras to rural areas in Namibia.
The musical programme is rather conventional. That there is no new musical indaba this year, Khumalo hopes, is ‘only a hiatus”. There is little relief on the fringe either, which is dominated by commercial entertainment.
Cinema buffs will be homing in on acclaimed Russian director Karen Shakhnazarov, who will attend the screening of four of his films.
The Studio has for several years now been a dedicated space for Eastern Cape community theatre, described as a ‘melting pot of clan cultures and traditions, old and new”.
The Winter School has taken an unusual turn with a section on ‘personal spaces”, including heritage roses and emerging decor trends in London and New York.
The festival may not be able to be all things to all people, but they are certainly trying hard to ensure there is something for everyone. — Brent Meersman