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.
WHERE THERE IS smoke in a story involving powerful figures, there is always fire. And the story that wriggles its way out into the public forum is often a cover from one much more sordid and filthy than the public should be allowed to know or can stomach. […]
VALENTINE’S DAY’S COME and gone with all its silly platitudes, earnest imperatives and underlying marketing ploys. But there’s a delightful little mad exhibition which is as much a foray on the love of another as it is about a maverick sense of what ifs. Love Letters by Diek Grobler […]
THE ROOM IS deeply silent, but robustly populated. All eyes are focused on the speaker, who is out of your line of sight. In this 1989 photograph of a trade union meeting at the University of Cape Town, photographer Omar Badsha (b. 1945) peers with a clean mix […]
SHE’S PETULANT AND childish, given to fits of rage and gout, and free enough in her sense of authority to lie on the floor and bawl or arbitrarily end someone’s working career, on a whim. Meet Queen Anne, a larger-than-life articulation of the unleashed lascivious baud and out-of-control […]
WHO WOULD YOU hire to be there for you, as you embark on a concert tour where you will be performing to an audience of the most hostile community possible? Pianist and composer Dr Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) had an eye out for the meanest most streetwise racist […]
SHE WAS ONE of black America’s iconic figures during the turbulent 1960s. And her songs were grist for the protest mill. But that wasn’t all. You think Nina Simone (1933-2003) – born Eunice Waymon – and you think of the wealth of beauty and subtlety, nuance and fire […]
What would it feel like to be invincible? To be able to rush through the landscape with a stolen bleating sheep on your shoulders, as the world shouts and chases you, as you remain safe in the knowledge that you’ll get away. Again. Much of the narrative premises […]
YOU KNOW THE drill. A bunch of sophisticated strangers, honed to the teeth by Agatha Christie’s fine and characteristically succinct descriptions, finds itself isolated from the rest of the world. And everyone’s a little annoying until someone gets themselves murdered. The delicious frenzy of the slick whodunit in […]
IT WAS A music teacher in the early youth of composer Hans Roosenschoon (pictured) who suggested the boy write music for piano, instead of take the conventional route of mastering the instrument first. “I think it was out of desperation,” says Roosenschoon, this year’s composer-in-residence for the Johannesburg […]
ZANE MEAS ADORES everything about South African writer Chris van Wyk. It’s about the cunning and oft self-deprecating magic of being Coloured in a world that doesn’t consider you black enough or white enough. It’s about the chalky memories of racism and the mixed up words and opaque […]
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