The Spier Amphitheatre, as any director who has tried to stage work there will attest, is a restrictive challenge. The performance area is an awkwardly wide, shallow rectangle; open air and with no wing space makes it anti-set designer; and the house, with more than 1 000 seats, favours commercial conservatism. It’s hardly the platform for emergent and cutting-edge work, which has long been Spier’s primary artistic ambition. The newly formed Africa Centre (on the estate) has shepherded a reconceptualisation of the Spier Arts Festival, an annual programme of performances staged there during the summer evenings, replacing it with three innovative new festivals.
Under the curatorship of Brett Bailey and Jay Pather, the theatre contingent has moved to the inner city. New site-specific works, combining directors, dancers, visual artists and even commercial designers, will be presented in situ at locations such as the Adderley Street fountains, the train station and atop buildings around Greenmarket Square. One work apparently involves a caterpillar excavator and a dancer.
An African music festival will run in October at Spier and in four locations in the greater city, under the stewardship of Neo Muyanga and Ntone Edjabe. Muyanga says a dedicated radio station will broadcast the events to achieve a wider reach. The collaboration is pan-African, with musicians from Mozambique, Angola and Malawi.
The first of the three festivals is the upcoming Spier Poetry Exchange with outreach satellite events to be held at Guga S’thebe in Langa, Verses in Long Street and several tertiary educational institutions. The sessions are hosted by ‘poetry activists”, exploring topical themes such as the affirmation of indigenous voices.
Curators Malika Ndlovu and Lorelle Royeppen-Viegi’s stated aims are cultural diversity, multilingualism and to build new audiences. They have emphasised poetry with visibility — performance poets who sing and rap and collaborative poetry productions with theatre directors (such as Jaqueline Dommisse and Mandla Mbothwe) and musicians (among them Garth Erasmus and Glen Arendse of Khoi Khonnexion).
The international poets billed, courtesy of The Netherlands’s Winternachten, a writers’ network and chic festival in The Hague, are strongly political. The sonorous-voiced Changa Hickinson is Rastafari and from Aruba, St Martin, and one of that Caribbean island’s better-known poets. Antoine de Kom, a descendent of a herbalist exorcist and a Surinam nationalist, is a psychiatrist who has published half a dozen volumes of poetry in The Netherlands. Violetta Simatupang writes in Indonesian and English. Her first collection Anak-Anak Vampir (2003) contains poems about diverse subjects, including ‘female roles and characteristics in the cultural and tourism industry”. Omekongo wa Dibinga is an urban poet and rapper of Congolese descent now based in the United States.
The South African poets selected are mostly women and, apart from the prolific and versatile Gcina Mhlophe, are not well known. Of these, Muslim poet Shabbir Banoobhai is the more established. His poem, sarajevo, written after a mission to the war-torn Balkans in 1992, won the 2001 Thomas Pringle Award. He is one of our few religious mystic poets.
Filmmaker and disability activist Shelley Barry has rocketed to success, much of it in the US and far from her Eastern Cape hometown and base. Her experimental documentary entitled Whole: A Trinity of Being was cited at the Black Maria Film Festival. Paralysed from the chest down at the age of 24, she is working on the aesthetics of cinematography from the perspective of a wheelchair user. The tenor of her poetry, which has appeared in the anthology, Lovely Beyond Any Singing, can be gleaned from this poem, titled whole:
I am whole
i will not shatter like fragile bone
i reshape/remake/reconstruct
a constantly evolving me
The Kalahari is the real muse for Belinda Kruiper, who lived with her late legendary husband, artist Regopstaan ‘Vetkat” Kruiper of the Khomani bushmen, in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. Her poem African Child is short enough to be reproduced here:
They can strip my soul bare
Look at me naked
Take a knife at what is flesh
Draw blood till I die
Amidst all I’ll hold pride
I’m an African Child
A month ago Napo Masheane, founding member of Feela Sista! Spoken Word Collective, launched her debut volume Caves Speak In Metaphors. An experienced performer, her one-woman show, My Bum is Genetic, Deal with It, was directed by John Matshikiza last year. She usually begins her performances with a recitation of her ancestors’ praise names. Her poems draw on traditional Basotho song structures and contemporary hip-hop and should not be judged on the page alone.
Listening to and reading much of the new generation local poetry, one starts to miss a more rigorous use of language, depth in formal ability and incisive thought.
The work does not lodge with one for long; little is missed on a first hearing. Many write from a perspective of victimhood, never get beyond personal agony, centred somewhere around their naval, and couch social issues in lifeless slogans and abstract exhortations.
But, what is fresh imagery to many is a discord and cliché to the more widely read — a recycling of stale content in novel formats. Spoken and sung poetry not only needs a sound, but also resonance and echo. A poetic response should be an aesthetic mediation between the personal and the philosophical, between our experience of the world and our approach to life.
What the festival does promise is a celebratory discovery of less familiar voices brandishing crossover styles. Giving them centre platform is essential for revitalising the art and creating a thirsty audience for poetry when readership seems to be drying up. In time, with luck the audiences will become more discerning and demanding as the Poetry Exchange grows experientially.
The Poetry Exchange runs on February 1 and 2 at the Spier Estate; the Performing Arts Festival is from February 26 to March 2 at inner-city venues in Cape Town; and the Music Festival will be held in October in a series of intimate venues throughout Cape Town. For more information go to www.africacentre.net