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.
The power of gender as a signifier for being in the world is incontestable. Consider all the transgender debates setting fire to social media and fingering critics as suffering from irretrievable bigotry, when they use the wrong pronoun for a trans individual. The sex of a stranger has […]
South Africa’s landscape is layered with history and filled with residues – even dried reservoirs – of great masses of blood spilled in battle – as is virtually every other place in the world that has been lost and gained, caught in tussles and fought over. Photographer Francki […]
As she walks onto the stage, bent over by her smoker’s cough and her palpable despair, Anna-Mart van der Merwe, in the role of Fugard’s ‘Millie’ magnetises the audience. She portrays the squalid baseness of poverty and worthlessness in an early 1970s South Africa with a sense of […]
There’s a fine and lovely ringing and rumbling set up in the blending, piece by quintessential piece of colour and texture in Tamlin Blake’s latest body of experimental works on show at Circa in Rosebank. And while, according to the exhibition’s press release, there’s a conceptual resonance set […]
Veteran South African artist, Deborah Bell’s latest exhibition showcases the kind of muscular body of work that gives you courage: the art world is indeed not comprised only of sham, drudgery and broken dreams, to say nothing of self-indulgent sophistry and vague conceptual ideas poorly translated. Rather, the […]
A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy? The eponymous Norman Jewison musical from the 1970s, based on a series of stories by Shalom Aleichem may be high schlock to most contemporary audience members, but it retains its status as a modern classic, for a whole rash of reasons, […]
With a hefty dollop of Beckett, some irrepressible clowning and a simple bittersweet tale peppered with absurdities, kangaroos and chameleons, not to mention an extraordinary set that comprises the skull of a gnu, a plastic shopping trolley and doodads that will make you laugh and cry, Andrew Buckland […]
“Compressor Pump” we used to call him, behind our hands, behind his back. Nasty caricatures were drawn of him on toilet doors and in the margins of lecture notes: a man with a big stomach, his nose in the air, a red face. He was the king. We […]
An elderly woman sits on the floor separating small stones from lentils. There’s an irrevocable sense of lyricism in her pose, her focus, which makes this mundane activity one of solemn importance. This photograph by Ranjith Kally of his mother, Rajwanthia Kally, taken in 1947, is a starting […]
Just when you think you know who’s hot and who’s not in contemporary dance, just when you’re catching your breath after Dance Umbrella, there comes a showcase work so utterly perfect, that all the parameters shift and you’re privileged to see the bar being raised again. Lulu Mlangeni […]
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