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.
THE GODS WHICH confer talent can be very cruel. Sometimes they offer the passion but surround it by so many obstacles, it makes your head spin. In casting a yarn based on the life story of transgender dancer Nora Monsecour, Lukas Dhont’s Girl, a film in French and […]
IT IS A great rarity for a theatrical work to be able to touch the nub of a complex issue that bruises a society, with potency, conviction and directness. It is even a greater rarity when the work in question is the product of unseasoned performers. And while […]
THE GENTRIFICATION OF urban neighbourhoods – even in cities such as Johannesburg or Cape Town – was once seen as a panacea to all society’s ills; today it has turned into a proverbial four letter word. This is because of its moral promises and literal hypocrisies, in the […]
THE ADJECTIVE USED to describe a persecuted community is dynamite. It can represent the psychological difference between your being able to recognise those someones in the community as people just like you, or “others” that are not like you at all, and therefore have nothing to do with […]
VISUAL ART HAS primeval, ritualistic roots; amid the moneyed operations of galleries and the cloying notion of commercially accessible easy art, sometimes those old levels of cruelty and wisdom poke through. When you encounter the current body of self-portraits by Steven Cohen, collectively entitled There’s glitter in my soup!, […]
OCCASIONALLY, YOU FIND a radio play which has the wisdom to splay open a socially controversial issue by engaging your intellectual muscle as well as all your funny bones. Doller as kopaf is a hilarious and brilliant spot of social commentary, crisply focused and beautifully constructed around the […]
ABLE TO MIX gravelly hard-hitting rock with the poetry you feel in your belly and as your skin breaks into goose bumps, Piet Botha, the lead singer and founder of South African rock band Jack Hammer had a curious and entangled relationship with the Afrikaans language. He always […]
THE HORROR OF being a small child beset with enormous flaws is something that many a writer may attempt to portray because of the challenge of capturing its profound complexity that scoops up the contradictions of being human and holds it tight. Not every writer can succeed. Nor […]
THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN politics and love in life is fairly well-trodden filmic ground, ripe as it is for some of the most beautiful romances imaginable. It’s a ground fertile with issues of young love, utter devastation, twisted values and magnificent music. Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War touches all of […]
WHAT WOULD YOU do if the internet got switched off tomorrow and all the little bits and scraps of your multiple engagements with different platforms of social media, the games you play and the relationships you’ve formed electronically suddenly vanished? Just like that. Writer Leon van Nierop takes […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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