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 YOU ENTER the theatre, you might be full of frissons of excitement contingent on the promises of Fire and Ice, the name of this double bill danced by Joburg Ballet. As the works unfold, you might feel oddly let down. At best, the ice you will experience […]
“DEAR MOM. ONE day, I’ll make you proud. I promise.” A small dedication on the wall behind Sowetan teenager Zinhle Sithole sums it all up. She’s the subject of one of Jodi Bieber’s beautiful series of portraits that takes the whole model of an exhibition to a new […]
HOW DO YOU make sense of loss? It’s a relentless pit of remorse and unspoken words, of perhaps guilt and ‘should haves’. It is an uncertain place of not knowing how your absent person would have responded to a given situation. It is in this morass of confused […]
YOU DON’T HAVE to speak Japanese to get completely hooked into the maverick possibilities cast out by the story of Isle of Dogs. You don’t even need to speak ‘dog’. This Wes Anderson animated tale of a society gone anti-dog is a fantastic spoof on the political idiosyncrasies […]
THERE IS AN unequivocal boldness to the premise suggested by Rungano Nyoni’s film I am not a Witch, which was chosen to open this year’s European film festival on the art film circuit. By dint of its title, it ticks a number of boxes which are geared to […]
HE WAS THE man who gave voice to the ordinary people in South Africa, those who travel for hours in public transport, work in ignominious circumstances and earn a pittance in KwaNdebele. Not afraid to go down mine shafts, or gaze at white Afrikaners in the eye, and […]
“MY HEART IS in every single show. Making children laugh makes me remember why I do what I do. It is the sound of the joy in this theatre that turns it into a haven,” children’s theatre guru Francois Theron told My View, in an interview some months […]
WHEN YOU’RE REALLY little, it seems as though everyone around you has stuff to do and responsibilities to uphold, and because you’re only little, you want to do what everyone else is doing, but you can’t. And you’re bored. And you think you’re not good enough. Meet Manie […]
UNEQUIVOCALLY DARK IN its condemnation of the hypocrisy and divide in society, the Pied Piper of Hamelin was penned by Robert Browning in 1842. Like Charles Dickens’s work, it holds a strange kind of magic which makes it understood to be for children, but the message is grim […]
A MAN EATS some preserved figs and develops a painful wind. Before you know it, the slight discomfort has turned into a severe heart attack, nay, cause for a quintuplet bypass. If there is such a thing. In the blink of an eyelid, he’s been whisked off to […]
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