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.
WITH HIS DISTINCTIVE white streak down the middle of his verdant Afro, his rubbery smile and his straight talk and complicated yarns, Marc Lottering is truly one of South Africa’s greatest treasures. His show, So I wrote that musical is performing at the Hilton Arts Festival in Pietermaritzburg, […]
COSTA CARASTRAVRAKIS HAS everything. From a name that gets the tongues of non-Greeks in knots before they even try to say it, to a sexual identity that gets the gossipy tables of flashy Greek mommies waiting for school to be out fiercely aflutter, to a mother with legendary […]
THE VETERAN BRITISH actress Miriam Margolyes describes the idea of doing a one-woman show as “lonely and frightening”, in her autobiography, This Much is True. When you see Serena Steinhauer emerge on stage in a flurry of words and wrap herself in the identity of three iconic women […]
YOU KNOW SOMETHING enormous has happened when your body kicks in, and when after experiencing this thing, you wake up lying on the floor with someone giving you sips of sugar water. This is where we find Belinda (Annette Havenga) in the opening sequences of episode nine of […]
SAY THE WORD ‘Fiddler’ in the film context to virtually anyone you meet, and they will know exactly what you mean. Fiddler on the Roof is like Van Gogh’s ear or Beethoven’s Fifth, in a broader cultural sphere. It’s also up there as the pinnacle of shlock culture […]
IF YOU DIDN’T know it was true, you’d deem it unbelievable. That’s Angela Merkel’s charmed life: It fits the parameters of a classical fairy tale. Clever girl born into marginalised village grows up to see democracy happen and later to become the country’s chancellor and lead it on […]
His was the story that changed the world’s understanding of the artist’s struggle. He yearned to, but failed to find love. He yearned to, but failed to make a conventional success of life. And at 37, died a pauper, alone. And then his work rocked the art world […]
WHAT ARE YOU wearing right now? Does it pinch and bunch, ride and give you a pain where it shouldn’t? Does it make you feel like a million dollars, nevertheless? Or does it feel delicious but whatever you do, don’t catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror, […]
DO YOU REMEMBER building forts with the cushions from your parents’ lounge suites and wearing your bedspread as a cloak and a colander as a helmet as you shouted loud and feral words and regally waved a ruler in the air? Alan Swerdlow’s current production of The Hobbit […]
DO YOU REMEMBER the cultural imperative in South Africa? The thing that you had to see, at all costs, whether it was an opera or an exhibition, a performance or an event? Kentridge’s The Head and the Load evokes this artistic urgency among South Africans, that is at […]
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