sceptic’s eyes Brenda Atkinson `I do make life difficult for myself,” sighs Robyn Orlin, eyelids drooping to prove a point, her voice suggesting fatigue and inescapable hardship. Orlin is musing on her latest performance piece, commissioned by the FNB-Vita Dance Umbrella and due for launch this weekend. With just a week of rehearsals to go, […]
WORKERS at Zimbabwe’s Boka Tobacco Auction floor, which belongs to the late tycoon Roger Boka, have reportedly not been paid for two months. Several of the business empire’s bank accounts have also been compulsorily closed. Boka, once seen as the champion of black empowerment in Zimbabwe, died after a long illness last month. Workers are […]
Review of the week Peter Makurube Five Guys Named Mo is a first rate musical set in Forties America – a story of love and friendship threaded around the music of jazz great Louis Jordan. The main theatre at The Market is the perfect venue for a show of this magnitude that has thrilled countless […]
SOUTH AFRICAN voters remain highly intolerant of their political opponents, according to the latest Markinor/Idasa Opinion ’99 survey. The survey found one in four voters openly admits being ready to take action against political opponents including being prepared to block speeches, rallies and other normal political activity. Up to half of African National Congress supporters […]
EGYPTIAN actress Yusra has been acquitted of outraging public morals over a risque photograph published on the cover of a cinema magazine four years ago, court officials said on Friday.Yusra was convicted after two Islamist lawyers complained that she appeared “nearly nude” in the November 1995 cover photograph of Al-Cinema wal-Nass.Defence lawyers argued that the […]
Question: What do you do with a large brown tube-like object placed between your index finger and thumb? Answer: Don’t deny the experience ever took place – as United States President Bill Clinton did after he gave Monica Lweinsky a cigar to titillate herself with while he watched. That’s the official line from the 70-odd […]
The introduction of six bull elephants seems to have sorted out the `aberrant behaviour’ of the young males in Pilanesberg, writes Barbara Ludman It was the sort of scene certain to delight visitors lucky enough to come upon it: a young bull elephant and two much younger males browsing peacefully together in the sparse bushveld, […]
Howard Barrell The African National Congress is pulling out all the stops to seize control of the government of the Western Cape from the New National Party in the election on June 2 – and it believes it has a good chance of succeeding. The ANC’s strategy depends on persuading upwards of six leading coloured […]
Charlene Smith King Carl Gustaf of Sweden this week knighted long-time anti-apartheid activist Horst Kleinschmidt with the Order of the Polar Star, Sweden’s highest award for foreigners. Sweden became the first government to acknowledge the incredible work over five decades of the organisation International Defence and Aid Fund (Idaf), which Kleinschmidt headed from 1979 until […]
aRonald Bergen on the life and films of Stanley Kubrick, the enigmatic and reclusive director who died recently aged 70 Over his 40-year career, the director Stanley Kubrick made only 13 feature films, yet the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his extremely slow method of working, the years of planning, the secrecy, […]