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.
Artist Bronwyn Lace enjoyed an important friendship with the late Neels Coetzee. She graduated from Wits University two years before she first encountered his work and knew him more as a friend and master of South African sculpture, in the latter part of his life, than as teacher. […]
What does it mean to be Coloured in contemporary South Africa, backgrounded as it is by a context replete with all manner of insulting histories and stereotypes, which teeter between hilarity and deep tragedy, simultaneously? Young theatre practitioners Leonie Ogle and Kelly Eksteen have cast this curious and […]
Walk into any environment. Engage with strangers. What are the basic signifiers that enable you to do so? For one thing, language. For another, gender. An understanding of whether someone is a girl or a boy fundamentally affects how you respond to them. Call it upbringing. Call it […]
Armed with a couple of cardboard trees, some simple box-like structures and tiny reflections of buildings and cows, three able young performers tell what could easily be South Africa’s most romantic and beautiful tale, offering a trajectory that stretches from the idyllic rurality of Mvezo in the Eastern […]
I thought I dreamed it. I remember the words “Theatre is dead in SA” on a street pole advert in black type on a while background under the dark blue logo of a weekly national paper, a few days ago in Johannesburg. And I filed the recollection of […]
Corrupting Noel Coward’s lyrics a bit but celebrating the intent of his 1947 song that warns a woman against putting her child needlessly on the stage, I cock a snook at the young mommies and daddies who bring their relatively freshly-hatched babies, still in swaddling clothes to the […]
As he clambers onstage in the glimmer before the production begins, you’re discomforted: you are not sure if he’s man or beast. It’s an ambiguity Tony Miyambo holds with sublime authority over the duration of this astonishing piece of theatre, allowing Franz Kafka’s disturbing 1917 tale of Red […]
In Ernest Hemingway’s treatise on bull-fighting, Death in the Afternoon, there is a fabulous cleaving of fact with fiction, leaving you not only mesmerised, but informed and entertained. Renos Spanoudes’s latest piece of theatre does exactly that, offering peeks into the complexity of Greek identity in South Africa […]
Arguably, Karin Preller is at this moment one of South Africa’s most collectible artists. She’s firmly in a mid-career trajectory, her work is uniformly exceptional and her prices are not (yet) skyrocketing. Also, her pieces are about a heady mix of skill, nostalgia and beauty. It never allows […]
It was William Blake who wrote of infinity in a grain of sand; there’s a logical, but also a peculiar parallel which happens unintentionally in Crucible, the first major retrospective exhibition of work by the late Neels Coetzee. It’s an odd thing, because the intensity and unequivocal beauty […]
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