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.
IT TAKES A very special level of respect for a story to be able to tell it with the dignity and complexity it warrants and not teeter off into preachiness or sensationalism. Ellen Pakkies is a real woman who was raised in the Cape Flats context of unrelenting […]
ANY MANIFESTATION OF the arts in the public domain involves collaborative energy, give and take, the use of others’ expertise. And the names of those people are mostly not on the headlines of the work. Ask any sub-editor, stage manager, gallery factotum or set designer. Björn Runge’s film […]
FORCING HILL-BILLY VALUES under the loupe and lasso of cowboy energy, Sam Shepard’s 1980s play, Fool for Love offers a raging and meaty reflection on broken love in a grubby world of lies, taboos and indiscretions. Director Janice Honeyman takes the project by its heart, and Kate Liquorish […]
DON’T BE MISLED into thinking that the relative size of sociologist Jacklyn Cock’s latest book is indicative of its value. Clocking in at less than 200 pages, this supremely lucid text is immense and it will take you the length and depth and width of the Kowie River […]
SEXUALITY, SONG AND the fear of losing what matters comes under the loupe in Choir Boy, a hard-hitting, yet simple play which is sensitively and relevantly translocated from an American context to a local one. Comprising a cast of four young men who articulate the groups and cliques, […]
THE YEAR, SO far, has been fraught with broken dreams and unfair realities. We’ve lost people we’ve loved. And jobs we’ve relied on. And when you look at people going about their daily lives, they seem to be going through the motions, rather than injecting possibility into whatever […]
WHEN THE FIRST thing you do after watching a period drama is to scour the bookshelves to find a particular volume and then secrete yourself between its pages, to gorge yourself on the story and the writing, you know the filmmakers have done something right. This is precisely […]
IF YOU ARE of a certain era, you hear the name ‘Clementina van der Walt’, and think immediately of a very specific type of ceramic object which became classically the work of this South African potter in the 1990s. They were bold and kind of clunky, they featured […]
THERE ARE ONLY a few days left in the season of arguably one of this city’s most important and best curated exhibitions. On Common Ground, put together by seasoned photographer Paul Weinberg, aligns and contrasts selected works of two of South Africa’s photographic giants – David Goldblatt and […]
RADIO IS A strange medium. Without all the bells and whistles of television, it has the power and the capacity to reach much deeper and more intimately into our lives. While the radio’s on, we can be spared from our loneliness, soothed to sleep, stimulated to respond to […]
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