The arts at large by Robyn Sassen and other writers
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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.
WHEN IT COMES to skop, skiet en donder films, you know the drill, if you’ve been watching films for a year or two. It’s clear who the baddies are. And the goodies. And you know that when the felon, deemed guilty by the system, goes to jail, they […]
IT ISN’T EVERY day that you get to see a film which has the gravitas of the bible, the sinister undertones and dark wit of Quentin Tarantino’s work and the timelessness and devastating subtlety of a classic of the ilk of work by Ernest Hemingway. In Jane Campion’s […]
WHAT IS IT with the broad public – strangers on the bus – when they encounter something out of their experiences and need to poke at it? Maxine, in episode 15 of The End of the Line, a series of British fictional monologues on podcast, ponders this issue, […]
FROM THE SINISTER complexity of its cover, to its end pages, Anton Harber’s 2020 publication So, for the Record is a vital essay on the current state of journalism in South Africa. And it’s not a pretty picture. This publication should be present on the bookshelves of anyone […]
SOMETIMES WHEN YOU think your dream opportunity has finally presented itself, you’re rudely given to understand that the universe has a whole different narrative plotted for you. The sequel to Craig Freimond’s 2012 film Material, called New Material, released nationally on 26 November. It will have you reaching […]
DO DINKUM HORROR stories still exist in our dirty, misshapen world of Covid, violence and mistrust? Do they still inspire fear (rather than revulsion, cynicism or lurid humour) in the hearts of their audience members? Playwright Deon Johnston pushes a clichéd horror trope down a path spiked with […]
IT IS NOT every day that a story has the potency to leap off the page and into the rhythms of your heartbeat, regardless of how it has been written or presented. Estelle Neethling has experience as a writer of profiles, not books. But when Adolphine Misekabu crossed […]
SHE’S LOOKING AT you peripherally, her face fierce and focused in profile, a pencil in her hand. She’s a woman who has waited her turn in a schoolroom in Kampala, Uganda. For generations. But she’s more than just a reflection of education and abandonment, of culture and sexism. […]
WHO OWNS THE abalone (perlemoen)? Who has a right to poach it? Who doesn’t? Why is it illegal for local South Africans to do so? These important questions lie at the heart of John Gutierrez’s film Sons of the Sea. A circular tale of desperation, death and diving […]
WHEN YOU WATCH a small child being exposed to the magic of theatre, you can believe in anything. Joyce Levinsohn, one of Johannesburg’s children’s theatre pioneers, understood this magic and this ability to believe, from the inside out. The founder of the city’s oldest traditional children’s theatre, she […]
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