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/ 13 December 2006

Durban’s debut

DURBAN is renowned generally for its beaches, bananas and blonde bikini brigades. It’s also got the dubious reputation of being a cultural backwater whose most popular theatre forms are musicals featuring pretty girls and music over 25 years old. But mime artist, one-man theatre-revival machine Aldo Brincat is about to change all that. The star […]

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/ 25 August 2006

African Baroque

An extremely rare occasion to hear the music of Ignatius Sancho presents itself when Durban’s Baroque 2000 ensemble performs a selection of the composer’s minuets on August 27, writes Alex Sudheim.

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/ 8 August 2006

Paying tribute to Trevor

Dead at 47 from an untimely heart attack, the most singular satirist South African art has ever known was felled in his prime. Trevor Makhoba left behind a truncated legacy of blisteringly brilliant paintings. Durban’s BAT Centre is honouring the legacy of the city’s most controversial son, writes Alex Sudheim.

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/ 14 December 2005

Taking the classics to the country

Tohe Kokstad Concerto might not roll off the tongue quite like the Brandenburg Concerto, but one cant help wondering what Johann Sebastian Bach, the 18th-century composer of the latter, would have come up with had he been commissioned to create the former. Would the rumbling trucks, sentinel-like electricity pylons and dry, dusty plains of the southern interior of KwaZulu-Natal have inspired him to create something critics would immediately praise for its harsh beauty? And would the quasi-Swiss quaintness of the more mountainous inland towns, such as Matatiele, have tempered this with flowing, pastoral romance?

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/ 18 March 2005

Louder than silence

If you turn the stereo to its maximum volume will you hear nothing as you’ve made silence so loud as to obliterate noise?" Is this question philosophical, metaphorical or literal? Zambian artist Anawana Halowa’s installation <i>Loud Silence</i> somehow manages to skid among a number of questions, observes Alex Sudheim.

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/ 8 October 2001

A spirited show

<i>Punk</i> is an epithet that gets tossed around with such abandon these days that it applies to a far wider range of music than it ever did when the Sex Pistols were around. Back then, all you needed was hair in spikes, safety pins through the nose, a cockney sneer, a healthy sense of nihilism and three chords to massacre on a cheap electric guitar, and you were bona fide punk.

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/ 31 August 2001

Durbs unleashed

While dignitaries and delegates from around the world do battle with the spectre of racism within the walls of Durban’s International Conference Centre this week, a formidable array of related cultural events takes place in and around the city, writes Alex Sudheim.

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/ 10 March 2000

M&G reporter scoops award

Mail & Guardian journalist Donna Block has won the inaugural Citadel Personal Finance Journalist of the Year award for the print media category. The awards are given in two categories: print and electronic media. The judges decided the quality of entries into the latter category did not justify naming a winner. The overall award was […]