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.
Warning: This production uses strobes. With a splutter and a bang, a whirr, many consecutive explosive pops and a roar, the little car ripples, eventually, into life and it’s got enough heart and soul for a whole family, complete with wings and fins, as the need prevails. This […]
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS ARE arguably the most complex and mysterious of objects invented. They can never just be objects. They can sing. They can laugh. They have identities and secret histories. They are beautiful and crafted and have a purpose which is about something a lot more intuitive and […]
THE FILTHY OBSCENITY of ratified apartheid legislation in South Africa put a very special and specific spin on the meaning of taboo. This was never pornography in the traditional sense, because that form of sexual gratification was deemed completely verboten. Rather, what you got under the apartheid regime […]
SAY THE NAME “Woody Allen” and if you’re able to remember a time before this filmmaker was branded as a sexual predator who had an affair with – among others – the child that he and his then wife, Mia Farrow adopted, you will think of the proverbial […]
SOMETIMES WHEN 110% of attention is focused on the beautification of every nuance offered in every film still, something very important gets lost. Pedro Almodóvar’s long awaited semi-autobiographical film Pain and Glory resonates, in some ways with the premises of Federico Fellini’s (1963) 8½, but with too much […]
THE AUTISTIC SPECTRUM is one that has become fashionably injected into common parlance. While there may be clinical value in its assertions, the terminology is too easily used by the lay man, resulting in a blunted understanding or crudely simple reflection of what this actually means. David Robbins […]
YOU KNOW THE guy who stands on the street corner you drive past every day? The woman who walks through the shopping centre where you shop, all her worldly possessions in two bags she carries? What about the teenager you see skulking around the municipal bins when the […]
IF YOU WERE conscious in South Africa between the 1960s and 1990s, when the apartheid army held sway over South Africa’s male youth, the premises of Korporaal Lemmer en die Rowers, this week’s Afrikaans-language radio drama on Radio Sonder Grense will bring swarms of goosebumps, blending army humiliation […]
THE CUT AND thrust of child trafficking in the skanky Italian village of Castel Volturno in Naples is the central focus of Vice of Hope, a beautifully told and immensely balanced tale of guttural possibility told through carefully constructed symbols in Italian with English-subtitles directed by Edoardo De […]
WHAT DO YOU do when you’re tasked with the staging of modern children’s classic that burst into popularity in 1964 and did not stint in saying things that were hilariously rude, flying in the face of all refined convention with some chewed chewing gum stuck behind its proverbial […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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