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.
IF YOU WERE a god and had every possible human proclivity at your fingertips, on a drawing board, which ones would you choose to embody your most perfect partner? Beautiful eyes? An ability to laugh? A talent for the spontaneous? Large feet? This is roughly the premise of […]
CHILDHOOD IN THE presence of other people’s children can be terrifying, if you are seven. Think of children bigger, more gregarious than you. Children who have a different understanding of privacy, of play, of parameters, to you. Laura Wandel’s extraordinary work Playground offers a child’s perspective on the […]
WHEN YOUR BODY says: ‘This much and no further!’ and your dreams are within arms’ reach but your land is burning down, what do you do? The story of Olga (played by Anastasiia Budiashkina) is a complicated one which offers a provocative understanding of nationhood and a prescient […]
… AND THEY ALL lived happily ever after. The classic love story is easily the one that’s the most well-used in storymaking contexts. But Clio Barnard’s work Ali & Ava comes with a special twist that force the cliched mould deliciously out of shape. It is on this […]
SPORT IS ONE of South Africa’s religions. It’s also been a cute metaphorical way of dealing with other concerns of a political ilk, in popular culture. Whistleblowers, created by the cast and directed by Rob Murray and Quintijn Relouw, takes things much deeper: it’s a scary, relevant and […]
IN A SACRED circle painted on the grass of the Hilton College campus, real magic takes place in the hands of Andile Vilakazi and Sbusiso Mhlongo. It’s the kind of magic that will not only affect your thinking about the pecking order of the gods that rule this […]
AGAINST THE BACKDROP of many ‘alwayses’ and lots of ‘forevers’ every relationship goes through a sequence of uncertainties and bumps in the road. Jason Robert Brown’s intimate musical The Last Five Years takes a relatively ordinary story and gives it shards of brilliance with turnabouts in the sequence […]
WITH A TOUCH of Janis Joplin, a bow to Ella Fitzgerald and a nod to Satchmo, a notorious stubbornness and an in-born sense of what art is really and how it digresses from the business of money, Eva Cassidy was a once-off. Kerry Hiles gives her story immortality […]
THE DREADED PARKTOWN Prawn. During the late 1980s in South Africa, it was the ugliest thing you could imagine, wherever in the political spectrum you were. It was a cricket, essentially, but very big and thorny of leg. It was orange and black in body and built like […]
IF YOU SEE one show this festival – or maybe this lifetime – do whatever is necessary to get to see Firefly. In the tight and clear but unabashedly mad ethos that Sylvaine Strike opposite Andrew Buckland represent, this play touches on the big questions of life in […]
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