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.
Replete with clear maps and a body of photographs, this biography of Tsietsi Mashinini by Sam Mathe is inequivocally a ten out of ten historical biography that will keep you gripped from page one, but will reverberate with your understanding of the fabric of South African history for ever after.
It’s a tale in which Buckland paints the landscape. Like a maker of haiku, conjoined with a watercolourist who can bring life, levity and insanity to a simple line cast across an empty stage, he performs the trees, and the road and the silly trivia that give fools fan status.
This tale is rich with the peculiar smell of crocheted hanger covers and the cloy of biscuit tins with crumbs and some rust in the seams. It’s about embracing ageing without the constraints of vanity, and it is about letting go and laughing from the very bottom of your belly.
There are times in ‘Prima Facie’ when you aren’t sure if it is your own heart-beat you’re aware of, or whether it is the play’s soundscape. Suddenly it is not really Tessa Ensler’s story any more. It’s yours. It’s that of the woman sitting next to you. It’s your sister’s.
Makan’s was a life of fullness and thoughtfulness; it was only in her mid-30s that she began to weave a grown-up narrative of artmaking blending her aptitude for a wide range of research interests and her love of family, with oil paint and later, the stuff of embroidery and haberdashery.
While all the niceties are in place for gossipy titbits in the English village of King’s Abbot, where Roger Ackroyd lives, you will wish for more of Gertrude Ackroyd (Louise Saint Claire) with her over-the-top personality as she empties her whisky into a teacup and pretends, with fiery hair, nonchalance.
Directors Gerard Bester and Sibahle Mangena facilitate the cast of over 30 teenagers, aged between 13 and 19, to voice their opinions about complex social issues the work is tight, it has levity and it will seesaw you through every kind of emotion you have in you. Don’t wear mascara.
This film is the deep primeval howl of a teenaged person who gets herself embroiled in a vortex of bubbles of semi-digested milk, of high school responsibilities, of expenses beyond her vision and of moving into a flat with a boy she is not grown up enough yet to know.
Roland, a toilet paper king in the business world and an unfinished musician in his heart is stuck in the mountains. The weather’s uncooperative; his phone’s battery is depleted. With not even a jersey to offer him succour, he resigns himself to letting his thoughts take him where they must.
Hentie van der Merwe’s recent WAM exhibition ‘After De Jongh’ was replete with a selection of second-hand prints of Tinus De Jongh’s work, placed on patchworked fabric. This evokes the broekie lace doilies and crocheted antimacassars of a tradition of ‘tzatzkes’ used to enhance the home of many a granny.
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