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.
Veteran South African artist, Deborah Bell’s latest exhibition showcases the kind of muscular body of work that gives you courage: the art world is indeed not comprised only of sham, drudgery and broken dreams, to say nothing of self-indulgent sophistry and vague conceptual ideas poorly translated. Rather, the […]
A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy? The eponymous Norman Jewison musical from the 1970s, based on a series of stories by Shalom Aleichem may be high schlock to most contemporary audience members, but it retains its status as a modern classic, for a whole rash of reasons, […]
With a hefty dollop of Beckett, some irrepressible clowning and a simple bittersweet tale peppered with absurdities, kangaroos and chameleons, not to mention an extraordinary set that comprises the skull of a gnu, a plastic shopping trolley and doodads that will make you laugh and cry, Andrew Buckland […]
“Compressor Pump” we used to call him, behind our hands, behind his back. Nasty caricatures were drawn of him on toilet doors and in the margins of lecture notes: a man with a big stomach, his nose in the air, a red face. He was the king. We […]
An elderly woman sits on the floor separating small stones from lentils. There’s an irrevocable sense of lyricism in her pose, her focus, which makes this mundane activity one of solemn importance. This photograph by Ranjith Kally of his mother, Rajwanthia Kally, taken in 1947, is a starting […]
Just when you think you know who’s hot and who’s not in contemporary dance, just when you’re catching your breath after Dance Umbrella, there comes a showcase work so utterly perfect, that all the parameters shift and you’re privileged to see the bar being raised again. Lulu Mlangeni […]
It’s curiously challenging to attempt to pinpoint quite what makes Rocco de Villiers’s work so utterly entertaining and sublimely successful. Not unlike Nataniël, but still holding firmly to his own brand, his is an approach that is light-hearted yet earnest, filled with puffs of effervescent notes yet competent, […]
Children’s theatre has the license to take the idea of soppy and stretch it to biblical proportions, which enables adults and children alike in the audience to cry with empathetic abandon, as the characters can declare love for one another with the kind of fierce naïve sentimentality that […]
They stand in a stripped bare John Kani theatre, which allows your eye to rest on and explore the architecture that has been witness to so much drama over decades. Surrounded by more than 20 plastic crates, some apples and a couple of swaths of material, these four […]
“The work begins outside”, people state as the crowd shifts and flows to the quasi-amphitheatre just beyond the foyer doors, and they are silenced in what is arguably one of the more beautiful, elegant and ironic starting points to this year’s Dance Umbrella. The choreographer/performer Nelisiwe Xaba is […]
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