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.
MURDER AND VIOLENCE have become so commonplace in South Africa these days that they often don’t make it to national headlines as they once may have. And in erasing the grand narrative from public awareness, the underlying personal tales of love and hope, of disappointment and stargazing get […]
OCCASIONALLY, IN THIS country and this industry, one is privy to a work that absolutely shines with all the values that good theatre promises to deliver. Amid all the political correctness, the paralysing self-censorship and other contemporary humourless ghoulies that beset our already beleaguered arts, there is this: […]
IF YOU GET a special thrill out of the character definitions and wiles of an Agatha Christie murder, you will absolutely love every trick and nuance in Anton Treurnich’s Afrikaans-language radio play this week. Stille Waters is a tale crafted out of the idiosyncrasies of small town personalities. […]
THE CULTURE OF the scary flick has a long following which was as much about the physiologically kick of a big fright as it was about being safely ensconced in the audience and not being susceptible to the grasp of an Agatha Christie baddie or the psychopath that […]
THE RITUAL OF watching a film in a darkened auditorium, on plush seats as we munch popcorn and cold drink is something that has been endemic to our culture for decades. It’s a moment of escapism, in which you can see dreams come true and watch magic happen. […]
GIFTED TEACHER, DEDICATED psychologist, professional endowed with compassion, creativity, authority and conviction, Mirah Wilks was brutally murdered in her own home, north of Johannesburg on October 6. She was 68. In many respects a shape-shifter, both in her own career and with the dreams of others, Wilks was […]
FEELING JADED BY all the sham, fake news and broken dreams that this world is dishing out to all of us right now? Well, there may be an antidote. Scholars and sociologists of the ilk of Rudolf Steiner, Joseph Campbell and others drew their threads of belief out […]
THE TRUTH IS a strange thing in the film industry. All too often the disclaimer that a piece is ‘based on the unbelievable but true story’ is used in the marketing junket. Does it really matter? Does it work? Do people flock more to see a film that […]
SACREDNESS IN AN object comes in many iterations, many of which can be completely unexpected. When you visit Charmaine Haines’s exhibition at the Kim Sacks Gallery, you will be accosted with a sense of the sacred that is joyful and full of levity, bold and clear, but unequivocally […]
IT IS THE 1960s, the time of the border war that saw the South African Police head to head with cadres of SWAPO, in what is today Namibia. Simon (Dawid Minnaar) and his wife Mia (Gretha Brazelle) are fugitives on the road to safer, less war-torn pastures in […]
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