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.
FILM REVIEW: LITTLE WOMEN WE LIVE IN a world which is characterised by a lack of credibility and stability. Fake news has taken over the media industry like a cancer, spouting disbelief in every crevice. Violence of both a literal and a figurative nature is perpetrated wherever we […]
CHILDREN’S THEATRE REVIEW: DISNEY’S THE JUNGLE BOOK KIDS. EASILY THE BEST show yet by the creative team at the People’s Theatre, Disney’s The Jungle Book Kids will have your child jiving in the aisles to songs which may be older than you are. It’s a deliciously messy, rambunctious […]
FILM REVIEW: LUCIAN FREUD – A SELF PORTRAIT THE CHANCE TO be able to get so close to the work of arguably the 20th century’s most important painter, Lucian Freud, that you can see the shadow between brushmarks, is phenomenal. Exhibition on Screen: Lucian Freud – A Self […]
FILM REVIEW: MOFFIE HOWEVER MUCH OF the horror and cruelty you may think you will experience in Oliver Hermanus’s Moffie, there will be more. This searingly important testimony to the obscenity of South African apartheid is riddled with the kind of truisms that will make you wish to […]
BOOK REVIEW: TRANCEFORMATIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS BY SYLVIA GLASSER IT WAS A work that would shake everything from the parameters of dance in South Africa to the way in which contemporary black dancers confronted their medium. Indeed, dance ethnographer, choreographer and academic Sylvia Glasser’s watershed piece Tranceformations that evolved […]
CHILDREN’S THEATRE REVIEW: ALICE IN WONDERLAND. TAKING A HEAVILY-detailed Victorian foray into a world conditioned by what we would in today’s times call surreal and packing it into one hour for a predominantly contemporary childcentric audience, is one challenge. Arranging it for a cast of but four performers […]
IS IT REALLY safe to assume that every watcher of commercial films the world over, has a basic understanding of history? We live in a time where libraries have lost their hold, paying others to write academic assignments is considered a legitimate means of earning the cheese, and […]
LIKE IT OR not, death is the final prognosis of all of us, and veteran performer Simon Fortin takes this on with a full-hearted foray in his stage work … Or not to be, drawing on both Shakespeare’s litany and his own considerable experiences. Everything tender and sharp, […]
A TALE OF lust and evil, worthiness and bias in the face of a racist society, teeming with some of the western world’s best known covers, Porgy and Bess seems to cock a snoot at everything that serious opera traditionally was about. Conceived and written by two Jewish […]
THE SIMPLE, TIMELESS lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel are the kinds of conjoined words and ideas that may have slipped so quietly into your sensibilities that you may not remember how well you know them, until you’re sitting in the audience of the revue of the Simon and […]
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