PROACTIVE IN THE complex task of making the field of opera possible and attractive as a profession for coloured South Africans, tenor and professor of singing Sidwill Hartman once told the media that his most coveted role was that of the gutsy Pollione in Bellini’s Norma. The tradition-contravening […]
WHAT WOULD YOU do if you discovered that your elderly mum, in her hand-knitted cardigan with her arthritic fingers, has had a secret life that is of great concern to the authorities? A life that involved nuclear plans and spies, sex and political manipulation? You might try to […]
HORROR STORIES OF interfering in-laws, told with earnestness and wit are so well trodden that they’ve become a cliché all of their own and there are a range of memes on the internet which describe them, both with humour and bitterness. Indeed, it’s seldom that a young couple […]
VERY RARELY DO you find a film that is effectively a piece of advocacy work, so searingly well made and intensely carefully constructed that it surpasses the threshold of actuality and turns into great art. Nadine Labaki’s essay in Amharic (with subtitles) on poverty and disenfranchisement in contemporary […]
NOT ONE TO crudely ‘blow his own trumpet’, New Music composer Jürgen Braüninger was a humble, yet vital composer and teacher based in KwaZulu-Natal, set afire by anything from Stockhausen to Zappa and African tonalities. A man with an ongoing wish to forge a new postcolonial South African […]
WHEN A GREAT story is told, it gathers together diverse energies, glues you to its ebbs and flows and allows you to walk away with its resonances ringing and rumbling in your heart and belly. Sometimes all it takes is a 90 minute foray into a rural landscape, […]
IF YOU’VE BEEN reluctant to watch part two of Die Pelsloper because you’re afraid to do so alone and in the dark, ‘reluct’ no more. The story, coined by Martyn Le Roux, takes on roughly where it left off, but sprinkled with a theme of love rather than […]
ARMED WITH RELENTLESS creative energy and passion, a hefty respect for the craft of performance and a crooked grin, Pieter Howes (formerly Pieter Bosch Botha), charmed the theatre industry and made audiences laugh until they wept for almost 30 years. He took his life on May 4, 2019. […]
SOMETIMES A STORY emblazons itself on one’s memory and sensibilities and stays caught in one’s sense of self, forever. The premises of Peter Shaffer’s devastatingly unusual 1973 play Equus, was to haunt millions. This was a tale as much about conventions as it was about the fierce energy […]
IF YOU REMEMBER the 1980 Jamie Uys film The Gods Must be Crazy or were taught a very simplistic understanding of San rock art in the grade 9 art syllabus, you will have a vague and superficial ability to recognise the complicated magic of Paul Weinberg’s voyages of […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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