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.
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 […]
A tonic replete with the heady charm of the 1920s, A Year with Frog and Toad is a fabulous paean to the value of friendship that will leave you with a smile in your heart, whoever you are. It’s a simple concatenation of Arnold Lobel’s sweet little stories, […]
Searing the South African political and Jewish landscape with a glance that takes in everything from the bizarre realities of farming culture and land reclamation to the philosophy of the kibbutz and where it is flawed, Marilyn Cohen De Villiers’s second blockbuster novel is a real page turner. […]
Very seldom does a piece of writing have the ability to reach into your heart and soul, not because you are strung along by your own inner realities and there’s a way in which you respond to the story, but because it is conceived and written and created […]
They bray like donkeys when a performer makes a move they’ve never seen before. They clap hysterically at any pause in the music or the movement, assuming this is their cue. They give standing ovations for anything at all. These are our people: South African audiences might have […]
A tatty Johannesburg nightclub, where apartheid is rife, the living is edgy and sex is a panacea for everything: welcome to Cincinatti. This play was workshopped in the late 1970s under the direction of the Market Theatre’s cofounder Barney Simon and a cast of theatre heavyweights of the […]
You are led into the space by a series of lit thick short candles, evocative of the memorial-imbued candles of Jewish tradition. You encounter a woman being washed by another, in a ritual context that is achingly intimate even though it is cast in the thick of audience […]
From the outset, before this rollicking monster of a production gets into its stride, the presence of the blood-stained wooden gate, the empty rubber boots and the cawing, mooing, snorting and barking in the sound track, lend Neil Coppen’s Animal Farm its inimitable tone. It’s very dark. It’s […]
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