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.
WHO WOULD YOU hire to be there for you, as you embark on a concert tour where you will be performing to an audience of the most hostile community possible? Pianist and composer Dr Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) had an eye out for the meanest most streetwise racist […]
By Geoff Sifrin GIVEN HIS HISTORY, one doesn’t want to give former president Jacob Zuma credit for anything at all, but you must admit he can dance, with his trademark chuckle. The nation watched horrified for a decade as he boogied on the deck of the South African […]
SHE WAS ONE of black America’s iconic figures during the turbulent 1960s. And her songs were grist for the protest mill. But that wasn’t all. You think Nina Simone (1933-2003) – born Eunice Waymon – and you think of the wealth of beauty and subtlety, nuance and fire […]
What would it feel like to be invincible? To be able to rush through the landscape with a stolen bleating sheep on your shoulders, as the world shouts and chases you, as you remain safe in the knowledge that you’ll get away. Again. Much of the narrative premises […]
YOU KNOW THE drill. A bunch of sophisticated strangers, honed to the teeth by Agatha Christie’s fine and characteristically succinct descriptions, finds itself isolated from the rest of the world. And everyone’s a little annoying until someone gets themselves murdered. The delicious frenzy of the slick whodunit in […]
IT WAS A music teacher in the early youth of composer Hans Roosenschoon (pictured) who suggested the boy write music for piano, instead of take the conventional route of mastering the instrument first. “I think it was out of desperation,” says Roosenschoon, this year’s composer-in-residence for the Johannesburg […]
ZANE MEAS ADORES everything about South African writer Chris van Wyk. It’s about the cunning and oft self-deprecating magic of being Coloured in a world that doesn’t consider you black enough or white enough. It’s about the chalky memories of racism and the mixed up words and opaque […]
OCCASIONALLY, WHEN YOU ignore the hype and opt to see a film that has not been aggressively marketed or thrust in your face, you come across a true gem. Paul Dano’s Wildlife touches on the complexity of gender in an age of misogyny and broken dreams, with the […]
A YOUNG WOMAN survives what is tantamount to a rape to discover her father murdered by her attacker. This is the kind of horrendous storyline which you may well expect to be emblazoned in a current newspaper. But no, this is Mozart at his most mature, in Don […]
SHE SIZZLES WITH her sense of queenly potency, her sexual beauty and the essence of being Cleopatra and all that she represents to the past and the future. This is Sophie Okonedo who defies ordinary adjectives. Her performance is so fine, you cannot take your eyes or your […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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