Grahamstown National Arts Festival

Photo courtesy of Grahamstown National Arts Festival. See photo credits below under "Sources"
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Festival Events:

A TREASURE-TROVE OF TALENT AT THE NATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL, GRAHAMSTOWN — June 26 to July 5, 2008:

• MUSIC
  
  • The show-stopping extravaganza, An African Celebration, headlines the music programme. Directed by the First Lady of Fun, Janice Honeyman, superstars come together in tribute to the Standard Bank’s 25 years as a generous and constant partner/sponsor to the National Arts Festival. Janine Neethling is Musical Director for a line-up that includes Sibongile Khumalo, Themba Mkhize, the Bala Brothers, Sibongile Mngoma, Zanne Stapelberg (Young Artist Award-winner for Music 2008), the Debbie Rakusin Dance Company, Jannie Moolman and the Standard Bank Jazz Trio – Concord Nkabinde, Shannon Mowday and Mark Fransman, all Standard Bank Young Artist Award Winners for Jazz over the past three years. A large section of the music programme is devoted to gems from the treasury of the mother continent.
  • For Letta - Sound of a Rainbow, celebrates Letta Mbulu’s life in song: featured artists include Sibongile Khumalo, Mimi Ntenjwa and music director/pianist Themba Mkhize. The greatest living exponent of bow songs, Madosini Latozi Mpahleni performs Hans Huyssen’s The Songs of Madosini with the Amici String Quartet. For this event, traditional instruments such as uhadi, umrhube and isitolotolo augment a string quartet with clarinet.
  • In Umrhube – Indigenous Music, amaPondo men, abaThembu women and Ntonjana girls, accompanied by musicians playing traditional instruments, perform the different songs that have marked different activities and life-stages since pre-colonial times. Prayers, lullabies and rain songs, other songs for work, initiation, celebration and drinking. Under the baton of Mokale Koapeng, the 16-voice chamber choir, Cantus Africana, presents two concerts, one in honour of the great composer Joseph Pulumo Mohapeloa (1908-1982) and the second ranging through work by Mnomiya, Khumalo, Koapeng, Glasser and Volans. African pianism and its history are introduced in a multi-faceted event which includes a talk by Nigerian Professor Christian Onyeji and a recital by pianist Jill Richards. She plays work by Akin Euba, Kevin Volans, Joshua Uzoigwe, and others. African traditions are at the root of many popular Latin American musical forms and, in their concert, The Johannesburg Guitar Quartet finds and accentuates the African rhythms in rumba, samba and milonga. Baroque and modern classics will also feature. Afro-Cuban rhythms, regional themes and jazz motifs fuse into the exciting Latin sounds Na’rimbo creates with marimba, sax, piano, drums, bass and vibraphone. This 8-strong Mexican group comes to the Festival courtesy of the Mexican Embassy.
  • In addition the music programme meets audience expectations of a full menu from the classical repertoire with some of the country’s finest performers. The annual Festival Orchestral Concert sees the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Peter Valentovic with soloist Zanne Stapelberg, Standard Bank Young Artist Award Winner for Music 2008. They perform two hours of well-loved works by the likes of Mendelssohn, Mozart, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Puccini and Strauss.
  • The Amici String Quartet – Suzanne Martens and Quentin Crida (violins), David Snaith (viola) and Peter Martens (cello) – is one of SA’s foremost chamber music ensembles. Their classical recital includes works by Haydn, Schostakovich and Dvořák (American Quartet). Strings star again as the Violin and Harp Duo, Marc Uys on violin and Jacqueline Kerrod on harp, present two programmes including works by John Cage, Camille Saint-Saëns, Paul Hanmer, Matthijs van Dijk and Braam du Toit. The lyric tenor Nicholas Nicolaidis, accompanied by Anneke Lamont (piano), presents two Lieder Recitals. The first includes a Schumann song cycle; the second features pieces by Leonard Bernstein, Hendrik Hofmeyr and Princess Magogo.
  • Big music in a festive mood is promised by the Festival Gala Concert: a fun family event with Richard Cock conducting the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra. They will bring alive light classical evergreens and reach a crashing finale with the great 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky, complete with cannon!
• JAZZ
  
  • It’s open season in this great annual jazz jamboree. Rising stars on the Standard Bank National Youth Jazz Festival mingle with performers at their peak, like dynamic young pianist Mark Fransman (winner of the 2008 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Jazz). South Africa’s best present once-off collaborations with their peers from Israel, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Norway, Britain and the USA. Where else but at the Festival could you hear diva Sibongile Khumalo in concert with Dutch piano maestro Mike Del Ferro? Or bassist extraordinaire Carlo Mombelli squaring up to avant garde Australian/German trombonist Adrian Mears? The programme includes a multi-nation play-off that could lift the roof. A number of top Eastern Cape jazz musicians will also feature.
• THEATRE
  
  • Multi-skilled Jaco Bouwer is one of the most exciting figures on the SA theatre scene at the moment so it was no surprise when he was announced as the 2008 Standard Bank Young Artist Award Winner for Drama. He collaborates with writer Saartjie Botha in an innovative piece, Untitled, that engages with the silent void between what we feel and what we are able to express in words. Unable to tell the grown-ups what she feels, the plucky pre-teen heroine of I, Claudia (played by Susan Danford) reflects on the dilemmas of life in the space between child and woman. The audience peeps into her secret hidey-hole where she tries to make sense of the adult world. “Blissfully funny… charming and heartbreaking” said Toronto critics. Kristen Thomson’s award-winning script is directed by Lara Bye.
  • Further down the road to adulthood, the central figure in The Quiet Violence of Dreams is one of the new generation of educated young Africans trying to find their true self amid the social and psychological hazards of a contemporary urban environment. The script was adapted for the stage by Ashraf Johaardien from the award-winning novel by K. Sello Duiker.
  • Two other new South African plays make poetry from the tougher side of existence. In Michael Wentworth’s Waiting, directed by Itumeleng Motsikoe, the main character is born destitute and endures a succession of accidents and disasters with a fortitude that affirms the resilience of the human spirit. Poignant saxophone notes amplify his dramatic monologue. Fortitude wraps like a protective garment round a gifted young girl who is the nexus of the swirling action in The Market Theatre’s production of Ten Bush, co-scripted by Craig Higginson and the director Mncedisi Shabangu. Trapped in a spiral of revenge, witchcraft and human sacrifice, is she to pay the price for wrongs that were committed before her time?
  • Two iconic figures who fought valiantly against wrongs in our recent past inspired two of the new theatre pieces for Festival 2008. Writer/director Martin Koboekae takes the heroic Steve Biko and brings him to life on stage as an intelligent and supremely likeable medical student in BIKO: Where the Soul Resides. In real life, the subject of Nadia Davids’ docu-drama Cissie, presented by the Baxter Theatre, belonged to a prominent Cape Muslim family. Cissie Gool was the first black woman to complete an MA in Psychology and she served as a Cape Town City Councillor before apartheid. The script is alive with anecdotes and cameos about her personal life and the social circle she mixed in: Olive Schreiner and Mahatma Ghandi were house friends.
  • No programme would be complete without tweaking the funny bone. Ellis Pearson and Bheki Mkhwane never fail to hit the spot with their blend of story-telling, physical acuity, side-splitting humour and deeply serious message. For Festival 2008, they bring us Australia vs South Africa, a rugby team effort with their Aussie counterparts Tom Lycos and Stefo Nantsou.
  • There are lots more laughs in Paul Slabolepszy’s For Your Ears Only. The funny man who observes current day South Africans so acutely takes us into a SAfm studio where an episode of The Soul of Sister Serious is being recorded, with all the gizmos you need for special sound effects. Another drama is playing out between the characters behind the microphones. Ralph Lawson directs a cast that includes Michael Richard, Louise Saint-Claire and “The Slab” himself.
  • The free outdoor performance programme for 2008 is given over entirely to magical African stories. Basil Mills’ Flight of the Lightning Bird – Impundulu, conjures up tales of the sky and water spirits with lights, music, dance and fire. Wise animal guides aid a young person through successive life stages in Ariadne’s Labyrinth. Director Li Parker uses a combination of choral work, drumming, movement and physical innovation to tell the story. Ellis Pearson and Sdumo Mtshali conjure up a cast of animals in a seriously fun piece, Impisi. Ousted from the pride, an injured lioness learns the power of positive thinking from two unlikely new friends: ugly, lame hyena, and bumbling, sight-impaired rhino.
  • At The Studio, high-energy Eastern Cape groups strike sparks with their stage presence. Using physical comedy and clowning as their weapons, The Fingo Revolutionary Sisonke Movement and Bantu Bonke tackle the iniquities of our prison system in Warders. The ladies of the Chiculso Drama Group from Libode celebrate the contribution of public figures like Miriam Makeba and Brenda Fassie in AmaQobokazana – Mothers of the Nation. UBOM! Obutsha Youth Company collaborates with The Purple Dragon (from Montreal) in Thrash!, a compulsive music drama about youths tossed in the maelstrom of township subcultures.
  • In the Student Theatre programme, twelve participating groups present a cross section of theatre on the frontiers of creative experimentation. They are all beautiful in their energy and youthfulness, all exploring the meaning of life (often with humour), all scrambling for a place in the main theatres of tomorrow.
• DANCE
  
  • Always a hit on the Festival programme, the ballet for 2008 is the deliciously Spanish-flavoured Don Quixote (based on the novel by Cervantes) with the South African Ballet Theatre and the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Graham Scott. The choreography is by Christian Tatchev (after Petipa) and the score by Ludwig Minkus.
  • Literary works also inform two of the contemporary dance productions: Romeo and Juliet by Dada Masilo (Standard Bank Young Artist Award Winner for Dance 2008) and Ozymandias, a collaboration between the Rhodes University-based First Physical Theatre Company and the John/Allen Project from Tulane University, New Orleans. Dada Masilo made an indelible impression with her performance as Lady Macbeth at the 2007 Festival. This year, she directs and dances Juliet in her version of Romeo and Juliet, using some Elizabethan costumes and many references to popular culture and contemporary movement styles. Shelley’s poem Ozymandias is an apposite reference point for a physical exploration of human ambition and the vulnerability of civilisations. Projected images of New Orleans after the floods enhance the interaction imagery in this multi-media dance theatre piece.
  • Two South African dancers and the choreographer Vincent Mantsoe come home from the Diaspora with Skin, a double-bill presented by Britain’s Ace Dance and Music Company. Artistic Director Gail Parmel invited Mantsoe and Akiko Kitamura (Japan) to work with her robust and athletic dancers in a journey across different surfaces and the similarities that lie beneath.
  • Many new works are based on a respect for traditional movement sources, and Festival audiences have a rare opportunity to experience the real thing in a performance titled AbaThembu Dance and Music. Presented by the Eastern Cape’s Department of Arts and Culture, with artistic direction by Skin Sepoka, the event focuses on the cultural traditions of AbaThembu, Nelson Mandela’s clan. At The Studio, three other rural ensembles present The Welcoming Dance – Umngqungqo. Wearing costumes that are works of art in themselves, the performers sing and dance to the accompaniment of traditional instruments in a living enactment of non-material cultural treasures.
  • From the quiet mysteries of the traditional, Tossie van Tonder takes dance to the liminal zone where the body is the only matter that matters. In Intiem etc she continues her biographical journey, placing herself at the forefront of her own limitations in an exploration of the aesthetics of the ageing body. Afro/French trained dancer/choreographer Bernardo Montet’s Batracien, l’après-midi / Amphibian, the Afternoon is a deeply meditative contemporary work about origins and transformation. The performance comes to the Festival courtesy of the French Institute (IFAS).
  • And the last laugh goes to Bar Flies a sparkling comedic piece by Roslyn Wood-Morris set in a cocktail bar. Gerard Bester, Rayzelle Sham and Craig Morris portray three love-hungry singles in a bar trying to make connections and succeed only in getting sillier and cartoonier as the drinks flow!
• EXHIBITIONS
  
  • Art photography continues to blaze a trial through Grahamstown’s exhibition venues. Wonderland, by Standard Bank Young Artist award-winner Nontsikelelo “Lolo” Veleko, is an in-your-face collection of street-fashion images that raises questions about the construction of identity and disguise. Obie Oberholzer’s The Hotazel Years reinforces his unassailable position as a great colourist, with the playfulness of a true mensch. The combination of a maverick eye and immaculate technique is formidable. The art of the moment, photography freezes action, but can produce images with a timeless portent. This is part of the fascination of Frozen in Time, a major collection of dance photographs by nine important specialist photographers all based in Germany, presented courtesy of the Goethe Institute.
  • Time is the subscript for Decade, an extensive and engrossing selection from the SANLAM art archives. To mark the organisation’s 90th anniversary the selection has been drawn from acquisitions over the past ten years. Work ranges from a Frans Oerder (1896) to contemporary pieces by Ricky Dyaloyi and Gavin Young. Andrew Verster Past/Present is also predicated on time: the exhibition looks at this well-known art-maker’s production since 1994, including his engagement with opera costumes, fashion and jewellery designs. Carol Brown and the artist himself co-curate.
  • The medium is intrinsic to the message in Maureen de Jager’s meditation on the mutability of memory, in her exhibition In Sepia. Using faded family photographs, she creates a third level of meaning in the rust that emerges from her engravings on steel and white sculptures with fragments of metal bedded into them. The word is intrinsic to the message for the four Botswana-based artists participating in Lefoko, Igama, Dibu, Word. The works on show all incorporate texts, including Setswana and Xhosa poetry, and several of the pieces are textile-based.
  • Art from the Ground Up, this year’s Eastern Cape showcase exhibition, is a collection of work by recent graduates which was successfully shown in Lower Saxony, the part of Germany twinned with the province. More cultural production from the province is on display and for sale at the Eastern Cape Craft tent on the Village Green. Demonstrations will play a much greater role this year, encouraging interaction between craft-artists and the public.
• FILM
  
  • If the film programme sizzles like a potjie on the coals, its three legs are three “tribute” programmes: one dedicated to prolific South African producer Darrell James Roodt, a second focusing on German filmmaker Wim Wenders and a third on that most complex of comics, Woody Allen. There’s a late-night double-feature series for the hard-to-shock cineaste; films by Jean Luc Godard and Miklos Jansco will remind us of the 40 years since May ’68 (the Soweto Uprising), and a challenging programme deals with spiritual themes. The line-up of recent releases includes Michael Raeburn’s Triomf, Nothing but the Truth directed by Ross Devenish, Caché and Breakfast on Pluto.
• WINTER SCHOOL
  
  • The Festival talk series aims to inform, provoke debate, stimulate curiosity and keep a finger on the national pulse. BASA comes to the party with sponsorship for a first-ever international arts critics’ symposium. Writers from around the world talk about their work and how they go about it and then lead audience debates after selected shows.
  • A broad range of topics is covered in the lecture series: climate change, China, the international arms trade and youth crime are examples. Speakers include Jane Taylor, Clem Sunter, Prof Deborah Posel and Sandile Memela, who challenges black intellectuals to contribute to public debate. Judge Dennis Davis and Advocate Michelle le Roux tackle the use and abuse of the law. The Legal Resources Centre hosts a panel discussion on “The right to education: What does it mean?” with, amongst others, Head of the Wits Education Faculty Mary Metcalfe and activist Zachie Achmat. The popular lifestyle and travel series includes talks, inter alia, by Bridget Hilton-Barber on her family’s very special garden and cyclist extraordinaire Riaan Manser on his circumnavigation of Africa on a bicycle.
• FRINGE AND CRAFT
  
  • The Fringe Festival programme features a full menu of exhibitions and performance across the disciplines and genres. Big names, feisty newcomers and emerging groups from the provinces all promise to feed the audience’s collective imagination. Around three dozen visual art shows have booked their spaces and The Transnet Village Green and Church Square precincts are a-buzz with colourful activity: one of the best free experiences at the Festival. Artefacts come in from all over Africa, making this a marketplace of craft-art. A plethora of fast-food outlets ensure that the taste buds also have an adventure.
  • And for the next generation of festinos, The Children’s Art Festival offers youngsters between the ages of 4 and 13 a stimulating creative arts experience in the safe environment of St Andrew’s Preparatory School with adult supervision throughout each day.

Support 2008:

• The National Arts Festival is proudly supported by The Eastern Cape Government, Standard Bank, The National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund, SABC and The National Arts Council.
  For further information contact +27 046 603 1103, or visit the website at http://www.nationalartsfestival.co.za

Other Sources:

Articles and Reviews:

• Small change. The contrasts in Grahamstown remain as stark as ever. The poverty is appalling, but it’s a reflection of the national scourge of unemployment, Aids, the economy, by Brent Meersman (Mail & Guardian, July 8, 2005)
  http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/2005/2005jul/050708-change.html

Images:

• Pictures from National Arts Festival 2004 at smugmug
  http://africa.smugmug.com/gallery/185072

Photo Credits for Slideshow:

• Image of Three Buskers, photo by Suzy Bernstein
• Mark Fransman, by Magriet Theron
• Clockwise, Marc Uys & Jacqueline Kerrod, by Steve J Sherman
• Madosini, by Suzy Bernstein
• Umrhube 2
• Sibongile Khumalo
• Australia vs SA - theatre
• I Claudia, by Guy Delancy
• Dada Masilo, by Suzy Bernstein
• Anya Carstens, Don Quixote production, by Susanne Holbaeck-Bergh
• Skin, Gwyneth Noot-Griffiths
• Intiem, Tossie van Tonder, by Joelle Chesselet

Practical Info:

Free Festival Booking Kit 2008:

• Available from selected Standard Bank branches and Computicket outlets nationwide from April 30. Booking opens on Monday, May 5, 2008.
  http://www.computicket.com,or
  http://www.nationalartsfestival.co.za/page/booking-information

How to get there:

By Car
Take the N2 out of Port Elizabeth; some 125km (77 1/2 miles) northeast is the turnoff for Grahamstown.

By Bus
Greyhound and Intercape operate daily between Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth.
Phone: (27) 46-622-2235

By Plane
Fly in to Johannesburg and on to Port Elizabeth international airport.
http://www.airports.co.za/

Visitor Information:

South African Tourism information and brochure request.
Phone: (27) 870-155-0044
http://www.southafrica.net/

Accomodation (Caravan and Camping Sites):

Albany SPorts Club
Contact: Mr Dyson
Phone: (27) 46-622-3388 (business hours), or
(27) 46-622-2960 (after 17:00)
Conact: Geraldine Sawyer
Phone: (27) 46-622-7207

Grahamstown Municipal Caravan Park
Contact: Dianna Bates
Phone: (27) 46-603-6093

Hoerskool PJ Olivier
Contact: Jenny Waters
Phone: (27) 46-622-3322 (between 08:00 and 15:00)

Rhodes University Accommodation
Contact: Conference Manager
Phone: (27) 46-603-8772
Fax: (27) 46-622-3659
Email: rufest@ru.ac.za

Do you have an update or more information about this festival? Email us at updates@kadmusarts.com
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