Author Archives

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.

The elegance of the humble peg

IT’S EASY TO take a broom, a peg or an iron for granted in the daily conflagration of things that constitutes life itself. It’s about the daily grind of keeping dirt at bay as much as it is about presenting yourself in public, to say nothing of domesticity […]

Why this bunny learnt to read

YOU MAY NOT think your three- or four-year-old is ready yet for lessons about the value of money, history and literature, but in the extremely able hands of director Daniel Geddes, your sproglet will be moved, taught and fascinated by the wiles of a silly bunny who cannot […]

Praise song to my mother’s skirts

THERE IS ALWAYS something completely seductive about the appearance of a queue of people. One after the other, each with their idiosyncrasies: it’s an understanding of humanity that honours their uniqueness but empathises with their common plight. And the logic and structure of a line of people is […]

Chetty Chetty, Bang Bang

CHILDREN ARE FASCINATING entities on stage or screen. Rogue in their sense of instinct, they can be either fundamentally defining for a work, or they can simply reduce it to a morass of precocity, doing damage to the artistic product and probably to their own self-esteem, by blowing […]