In the mid 1990s Afrikaans theatre needed a naughty black sheep — and it got one in the form of trippy, bizarre, audacious Porselynkas, one of the first performance poetry groups in the country.
Fourteen years later the group’s founder goes in search of the original members, intent on interviewing them and having one final “happening” — as well as smacking them each in the gob with a cream pie. Besides the interviews (as off-the-wall as the original shows), there’s original footage of the edgy, messy, weird shows where everything was acceptable and nothing too outré, anarchic or taboo.
And while the film isn’t too bothered about ‘why’, there are a handful of commentators on hand to explain the cultural context — why it was so popular — and unpopular — at the time, why it could only have come out of Stellenbosch in the 1990s and whether the prayers of various church groups were successful or not.
Equally interesting is the film’s unwitting commentary on the evolution of the avant-garde — Porselynkas’s original crew has moved on and the roads they’ve chosen are as interesting as the original concept.
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