The arts at large by Robyn Sassen and other writers
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Robyn Sassen
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.
WHAT DO YOU think you were put on this planet for? To hone your artistic instrument? Make babies? Save the world? Whatever the question, the answer sometimes comes rather unexpectedly and with great gusto, from the universe itself. The Bulgarian film Mother, written, directed and produced by Zornitsa […]
SOMETIMES THE UNIVERSE has to grab you by your shirt fronts and force you to focus on what matters, regardless of the bits and pieces you may think you have to do. This, conjoined with a woo-woo tale feathered by old truths and trendy values is the central […]
HOW DID YOU keep body and soul together during the particularly grim days of Covid-19 hard lockdown? Not in terms of putting food on your table, but in terms of holding your spirit in the place where it should be, to keep you buoyant. A group of Londoners […]
SHE STANDS WITH the kind of poise that catches you in the throat, and once you’ve made contact with her eye, you cannot move on without feeling that something within you has changed. Is it in the sheer beauty of her coat, speckled by God himself? Or is […]
THERE IS NOTHING quite like the anger of an articulate playwright to get the currents of electricity flowing through the veins of an audience. My Fellow South Africans by Mike van Graan charges up the levels of political satire with strong potency and his best weapon of choice […]
VERY OCCASIONALLY, THE world offers you an experience which is so utterly perfect in how it touches you, intellectually and spiritually, emotionally and with quirkiness, that it will change how you look at the world. This is what you can expect in the stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s […]
HOW DO YOU look back on close to six decades of incredulity at the caveats and bouquets of humour so off the wall that only politicians could have written them? Pieter-Dirk Uys’s latest theatre production, Sell-By Date, which performs at Montecasino until 10 September looks at a lifetime […]
FORTY-ONE YEARS AGO, Paul Slabolepszy’s play Saturday Night at the Palace rocked the theatre-going sensibilities of South Africa. This was art so close to the mirror that it reeked and terrified. It’s enjoying a season currently at the Joburg Theatre, under the direction of Albert Maritz and it […]
MONEY IS A strange thing. It’s like energy. You don’t have it? Its value changes. You do? Again, it’s something different that speaks to legacy and hope, luxury and a whole range of nice-to-haves. Not everyone might agree with this if you presented them with pocketsful of cash […]
WITH HIS THICK head of hair that is more TV host than radio host, he’s the voice that the people of KwaZulu-Natal wake up to, see their blood pressures rise to the tempo of the news with, and enjoy chewing the cud alongside, once the children have been […]
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