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 YOU GET down and dirty with your own talent, you experience something otherworldly. It’s like being in love. It’s like looking in the mirror. It’s like pushing yourself beyond your own ability to disparage what you can do, when you really allow yourself to open your wings […]
PLACE THEATRE DIRECTOR Yaël Farber and Shakepeare’s Macbeth on the same page and you may, in your mind’s eye and heart, picture a bloodbath of gargantuan and subtle proportions, replete with screams of agony and wails of horror. You won’t be completely wrong. Indeed, in Farber’s direction of […]
FILMS WARNING SOCIETY of the dangers of alcohol addiction may come and go, but Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round will stay with you for a long time. This Danish work which is unequivocally the king of this year’s European Film Festival South Africa, is available without cost and online […]
IF YOU NEED a pick-me-up story that touches on all the bases of being alive and rubbishes traditional values that don’t always have a fairy tale ending in real life, you need to imbibe Rosa’s Wedding. Directed by Icíar Bollaín, this Spanish film is unequivocally, the feisty nectar […]
YOU MAY BE forgiven for thinking you’ve keyed into a Neil Gaiman novel in the first few minutes of Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert’s film Never Gonna Snow Again. Featuring Alec Utgoff as a young Russian with many unusual skills, the opening scene in this mysterious but beautiful […]
LOSING A PARENT is immensely painful. Losing a parent suddenly can knock not only the wind out of you, but also a whole lot of unresolved issues into the ether. And some of them you may not want to revisit. This is how Antoinette Beumer focuses her complex, […]
HOW DO YOU tell your beautiful little six-year-old daughter that she faces a sheer cliff in terms of how the year ahead may look for her health? Little girls are supposed to be thinking about unicorns and mermaids, dragon slayers and princesses, not about whether their arms and […]
WHEN LIFE KICKS you hard in the proverbial teeth and you don’t know which way to turn, who do you become? This is an idea developed by Ruth Meehan, in The Bright Side. More than an essay on breast cancer, this is a sassy, sarky and oft sweet […]
RELATIONSHIPS ARE THE glue to life. And they’re the lubricant to most stories. The professional relationship between Aïssa (Déborah Lukumuena) and Georges (Gérard Depardieu) is central to Constance Meyer’s film Robust, which is widely punted as a tale of contrasts. It is available online and without cost, as […]
IF YOU WERE living your worst life and the sliver of an opportunity presented itself for you to change it for the better, a dangerous sliver, would you grab it? The romance of the tale of Simas Kudirka, the Lithuanian radioman at sea who saw an opportunity to […]
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