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. This blog promises you new stories every week, be they reviews, profiles, news stories or features.
PLEASE BE WARNED: STROBE LIGHTS ARE USED IN THIS PRODUCTION! WHEN YOU ENTER the sacred confines of a new work which you’ve yet to experience and the front of house staff issue you with ear plugs along with your tickets, be afraid, be very afraid. Flemish choreographer Jan […]
THE FACT OF death always belies what you may anticipate when you think of losing a loved one. One year after the untimely passing of David Brown, an extraordinary testament to the love of his family and his energy and focus, by way of an exhibition entitled Zoo […]
AS YOU ENTER the architecturally sacrosanct-seeming space of the upstairs level of the Standard Bank Gallery, Dumile Feni’s Guernica hits you in the solar plexus. It’s like a series of overwhelming chords in a familiar requiem. Hung in the back of the space, this magnificent drawing in ink […]
PLEASE BE WARNED: STROBE LIGHTS ARE USED IN THIS PRODUCTION! TAKE A LOOK at the world around you. Every inch of everything you glance at is striving for your attention, be it in the form of social media or marketing or beggars in the street, touting their misery. […]
TAKE A HANDFUL of western fairy tales. Inject into them a goodly measure of Jungian myth-making, and Rudolf Steiner thinking, spiced with some pop psychology, tight Broadway sequences, a dollop of cynicism, some good rhythmic writing and not a little tongue in cheek-ness and you get a rollicking […]
WHEN THE UNIVERSE presents a possibility in your life that is unequivocally wrong, but still, it’s there, what do you do? A chance encounter with a literary letter when she was down and out and had no where to turn, represented an important turning point for American writer, […]
WHAT ARE THE basic parameters that inform a festival of contemporary dance? Should there be a gatekeeper who assesses wannabe shows on the gig and plays god, in his or her ability to give a hopeful group of applicants the ‘yay’ or ‘nay’? And who is that gatekeeper? […]
WHEN YOU HAVE enough passion for something that is important to you, often the universe casts a fond eye in your direction and throws something your way to encourage you, even more. This was something that inveterate film-watcher Johann Botha (67), a semi-retired Pretoria resident experienced on February […]
THERE’S NO SLEIGHT of hand or conceptual tricks in Corlie Schoeman’s considerable body of pottery exhibited in the Pretoria Arts Association ‘Potter of the Month’ slot for March. She refers to the technique she uses here as ‘cleilap’. And you can easily understand why. These objects, big and […]
SOUTH AFRICAN PERFORMER Lara Lipschitz very rapidly dispossesses you of stereotypical beliefs that women comedians need to be unbeautiful, fat and self-deprecating in order to be funny. Okay, hold that self-deprecating angle a little: in her third season of her self-designed, -directed and -written web series, Chin Up!, […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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