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. This blog promises you new stories every week, be they reviews, profiles, news stories or features.
AFRIKAANS RADIO DRAMA: AS ONS TWEE EERS GETROUD IS As you barge into the Van der Merwes’ household this evening, all the miseries of lockdown will miraculously disappear, albeit for just one hour. Tonight sees the start of Radio Sonder Grense’s Afrikaans-language radio theatre season, and the organisers […]
TRIBUTE: STEVE FATAAR (1943-2020). A MAN WITH true heart, fluid musicality and a profound sense of dignity that never needed polishing with platitudes and compliments, Durban-based singer, acoustic guitarist and song-writer, Steve Fataar passed away from lung complications on 18 January 2020. He was 76. A seminal part […]
ART REVIEW: ALMOST NO MEMORY. AN ELDERLY WOMAN sits on an upholstered chair in a room awash with the harsh light of the South African highveld. Alongside her is a display cabinet, an element of furniture that was once fashionable. But the woman is diminishing. She is rendered […]
THEATRE REVIEW: RETURN OF THE ANCESTORS WITH A POTENT nod in the direction of the 1981 classic South African play, Woza Albert!, Mike van Graan’s Return of the Ancestors is a provocative essay on what has become of the world in which we exist. It offers a premise […]
ART REVIEW: LOVE IS A DANGEROUS DRUG HOW DO YOU tell the story of a complicated life in a way that visitors to an exhibition can access, empathise with and take something away from, without detracting from your story? You have their attention for a fleeting 30 minutes, […]
FILM REVIEW: LITTLE WOMEN WE LIVE IN a world which is characterised by a lack of credibility and stability. Fake news has taken over the media industry like a cancer, spouting disbelief in every crevice. Violence of both a literal and a figurative nature is perpetrated wherever we […]
CHILDREN’S THEATRE REVIEW: DISNEY’S THE JUNGLE BOOK KIDS. EASILY THE BEST show yet by the creative team at the People’s Theatre, Disney’s The Jungle Book Kids will have your child jiving in the aisles to songs which may be older than you are. It’s a deliciously messy, rambunctious […]
FILM REVIEW: LUCIAN FREUD – A SELF PORTRAIT THE CHANCE TO be able to get so close to the work of arguably the 20th century’s most important painter, Lucian Freud, that you can see the shadow between brushmarks, is phenomenal. Exhibition on Screen: Lucian Freud – A Self […]
FILM REVIEW: MOFFIE HOWEVER MUCH OF the horror and cruelty you may think you will experience in Oliver Hermanus’s Moffie, there will be more. This searingly important testimony to the obscenity of South African apartheid is riddled with the kind of truisms that will make you wish to […]
BOOK REVIEW: TRANCEFORMATIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS BY SYLVIA GLASSER IT WAS A work that would shake everything from the parameters of dance in South Africa to the way in which contemporary black dancers confronted their medium. Indeed, dance ethnographer, choreographer and academic Sylvia Glasser’s watershed piece Tranceformations that evolved […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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