/ 26 August 2010

Durban theatre picks: August 27 2010

Whether you love carefully constructed language or language that is falling apart at the seams, there is something to see this weekend.

  • The 12th Annual JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience sees Durban playing host to a dazzling array of cutting-edge international dance for twelve whole days. Hosted by the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Creative Arts, JOMBA! has become one of the biggest festivals of its kind on the African continent and features prominently on the global dance calendar. Showcasing acclaimed Gauteng companies Moving Into Dance Mophatong and Ntsoana Contemporary Dance Theatre Company as well as Durban’s award-winning Flatfoot Dance Company, the festival also hosts special guests Reunionaisse Soul City from Reunion and cult Swiss choreographer Foofwa d’Imobilité. Other exciting aspects of the event is the New Works programme which features daringly experimental work from emerging choreographers and dancers as well as the developmental platforms of The Fringe and The Youth Fringe. An exciting new development is the colloboration between JOMBA! and the Durban Art Gallery at the latter’s Red Eye art/fashion/dance/music jamboree on Friday September 3.

    JOMBA! runs at the Elizabeth Sneddon from September 1 to September 12. Visit www.cca.ukzn.ac.za for full programme details, workshop schedules and venues. Tickets are from Computicket.

  • French-Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco, together with Samuel Beckett, is one of the leading lights of absurdist theatre, the genre in which dark humour and nihilism form a sweetly toxic melange in which banality is ridiculed in the most savagely surreal fashion whilst the belief in the essential meaningless of human existence is also strongly espoused. Rhinoceros, one of Ionesco’s most startlingly original works, enjoys a rare run in Durban this week. Rhinoceros takes place in a tiny village of unspecified time or place where locals pass the time by passionately debating the most insignificant of issues. The protagonist, Berenger, is an everyman character who, like everyone else, is a barstool philosopher when, one by one, the people around literally morph into rhinoceroses until ultimately he is the only villager still in human form. The peculiar tale is, despite its superficial whimsy, a disturbing study of the human tendency toward pack mentality in which man displays his incomparable prowess in violently forcing conformity and obedience.

    Rhinoceros is staged at the Durban University of Technology’s Courtyard Theatre from September 1 to September 4. It features a cast of 35 DUT students and is directed by Lloyd O’Connor. Entrance is R20 at the door. Tel: 031 373 2194.

  • Durban’s Live Poets’ Society, aka LiPS, convenes for its September rendezvous this week. The muse-whisperers are on this occasion concerned less with matters esoteric than they are with those political: under discussion will be the looming spectre of the nefarious proposed Media Appeals Tribunal and Protection of Information Bill. Based on the stirring conviction that poetry has forever been a redoubtable defender of freedom of speech and has without fail boldly withstood any and all forms of coercion or oppression, the members of LiPS assemble to stand in solidarity with press freedom in the spirit of Nelson Mandela’s famous utterance: ‘South Africa should put the freedom of its press at the top of its priorities as a democracy. A bad free press is infinitely preferable to a good subservient one.” The theme of the event is thus ‘Freedom” with the guest poet acclaimed wordsmith Harry Owen, the inaugural Poet Laureate for Cheshire in the UK who moved to the Eastern Cape in 2008 and is the author of four poetry collections, the latest being this year’s well-received Non-Dog.

    The event takes place at the Point Yacht Club on Wednesday September 1 at 6pm. Entrance is free and all are welcome. Visit www.harry-owen.co.uk