The arts at large by Robyn Sassen and other writers
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Robyn Sassen
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 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 […]
YOU MIGHT NEVER have thought of the sinew at the back of your knee as something to hang your whole body weight on. You might also never have contemplated the awkwardness of being in an elevator as a dance-making opportunity. The whirligig that is the human body is […]
SIT STILL FOR a moment and listen. If you are lucky enough to be in a place where birdsong reaches your ears before the angry rush of traffic, hold onto that. But try to hear what those birds are saying, and take heed. This is the nub of […]
GLOWING, YET UNDERSTATED magic comes of a particular kind of candid, descriptive writing that doesn’t stoop to sensationalism or bald self-promotion. You can find this in George Orwell’s domestic diaries, but you can also find it in Adam Riley’s Birds of South Africa. This current publication offers an […]
IT TAKES IMMENSE skill and maturity to know that the telling of a story filled with detail and drama, with interstices of horror and loss and replete with almost 60-year-old ghosts is done not with gimmicks and tricks, with big noise and flashing lights, but with an old […]
MALICIOUS GOSSIP, THE quest to squeeze your body into impossible Spanx and the need to slap sticky tape on your hairline in the name of fitting in, are just a couple of the indignities that women are brainwashed to comply with, in the world in which we live. […]
WITH A RUMBLE and a splash, a bit of babelas and some office politics, episode six of Martyn Le Roux’s serialised podcast tale, Die Soutwaterheks, (The Salt Water Witch), sees Frans (Francois Coertze) being taken care of by his assistant Belinda (Annette Havenga) and while her physical appearance […]
WHAT IS A teen flick? Dealing with issues and dreams too big to fit a framework suitable for pre-adolescents, it should contain the values that feel relevant to youth, but not flow too deep or wide to be irresponsible, and yet retain a relevance that’s neither prissy nor […]
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