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.
FORTY YEARS AGO the Market Theatre was established in Johannesburg. It was the same year as the Soweto Uprising. South Africa was suppurating in a mire of apartheid, to the backdrop of sanctions, disinvestment and states of emergency. Terrible people were doing terrible things. This period was the incubator […]
THERE’S A CLINICALITY to this intense body of photographic work that repels your inner being and makes you want to turn away and then run away really quickly before you encounter the works in detail. But that same inner being of yours knows that if you do this, you […]
THE FRISSON OF excitement at the start of a new play is in the air. The audience is exuberant but alert, as soon as the lights drop, silence prevails. And focus. The play begins. He walks on stage. And out of his mouth sprout words I do not understand. […]
HOW DO YOU represent sexual violence on stage? It cannot be sexy. It cannot be comical. It cannot be beautiful. It cannot be explicit. It also cannot be abstract. Your audience has to go away from the spectacle shattered with an understanding of the horror, the irrevocable violation that […]
YOU MIGHT NOT be able to recognise that your boss is a psychopath. Until, of course, her behaviour gives her away. Evil or madness in a human being in real life is not easily recognisable. People don’t run around bullying and destroying other people’s lives with a great big […]
WITH A TOUCH of Pablo Picasso, a hint of Hieronymus Bosch, a foray in the direction of Norman Catherine and another towards Mmakgabo Sebidi, not to mention some hefty nods to George Grosz, the work of Blessing Ngobeni seduces all your senses from the moment you walk into […]
INSTINCTIVELY, YOU CAN hear the gentle, almost innocuous concatenation of 1960s office party dialogue as you look at these paintings, with the delicate clink of glasses and the understated and polite chatter, the men in their tuxedos and cufflinks and the women in their cocktail best. You can almost […]
AS YOU APPROACH what may seem at the outset a haphazard mass of calligraphic paint marks, piling paint smears upon paint smears, the fine hairs at the back of your neck may stand up. This is a landscape. Those tiny little ant-like forms emerging from it are people, and […]
HOW BEST DO you tell a story sullied and broken by trauma? Do you blurt it all out in one brutal shriek? Or do you give it context and framework? Do you make it circuitous? And funny? Joseph Heller did it. Alan Bleasdale did it. As did Luigi Pirandello. […]
A PLAY OF binaries and detritus, red wool and solar powered Consol glass, The Year of the Bicycle is a work that begins with the threat of too much whimsy. But then it reaches into the belly of its own sense of momentum and this abstract tale of the […]
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