A freelance arts writer since 1998, I fell in love with the theatre as a toddler, proved rubbish as a ballerina: my starring role was as Mrs Pussy in Noddy as a seven-year-old, and earned my stripes as an academic in Fine Arts and Art History, in subsequent years. I write for a range of online and print publications, including the Sunday Times, the Mail & Guardian and artslink.co.za and was formerly the arts editor of the SA Jewish Report, a weekly newspaper with which I was associated for 16 years. I am currently a Research Associate at Wits University. This blog promises you new stories every week, be they reviews, profiles, news stories or features.
Anwar McKay’s beautiful book ‘The Invisible Boy from Bramble Way’ is about coming out queer in a religious Muslim world coloured by Calvinist values, apartheid relics and bias. It is about learning to call the world – the ‘rich’ parts of the world — home, because you can. Because you’ve earned it.
‘Black Burns Fast’ is told with skill sass and energy, with cheekiness and delicious bravado offering up the quandary of being gay and black in a hugely privileged all girls private school. Luthando’s mum is a single parent. Luthando’s not at this school lightly: it’s based on her academic smarts.
The high end musical Pretty Woman never pretends that the arrangement between Vivian and Edward is anything other than what it is. She’s a prostitute; he’s a rich guy. It is a deal, and both of them know it. But knowing something and feeling it are two different things.
Jessica Haines’s play is a twisty yarn that reaches gingerly from the feral fluffy boundaries of childhood, into the complexities of growing up in a world where ‘perfect’ is forced as a binary and compliance with the notion of what ‘perfect’ might mean can point imperatively to self-mutilation, or worse.
It acknowledges and celebrates the flow of gravity and of fabric and the use of the fingers, hair and the expressions of the face in the material. And with all the sturm and drang of excesses and morals, values and torment, the dancers are consistently deliciously light on their feet.
It is in the crisp performance, the impeccable timing and the energy between Kabwe and Elderkin that render this work unforgettable. If you have loved and lost, if you have watched an illness become something that overflows the margins of being, , this play will speak to you. And haunt you.
This story has a weight that cannot be told with a clean chronology. It’s about love and loss and big promises which are devastating and seismic to keep. It’s about holding on to the things that matter and the memories of love on a light tower in a music festival.
It is here where the dead rise palpably and in beautiful costumes and choreography, to jiggle their bones and have discourse with those who mourn them. Frida takes the whole of the first act to be convinced to visit her Diego, who wasn’t all that gentle while she was alive.
Rather than offering a palatable chronology, Choritz divides her tale into 54 parts, some rooted in whimsy, others in blood. There are parts that are difficult to read because the authorial voice strips herself so naked and says things so raw that you, reading, feel afraid of your own thoughts.
Ramsay is utterly formidable in this role, which brings out an immense yet delicate sense of nobility coupled with almost crippling vulnerability, and all hidden beneath the tight facade. With a profile rendered regal and indomitable by an astonishing a wig, Ramsay paints a Callas fearless, cruel, funny, irrepressibly human.
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