Category: Book

Slides of life

BOOK REVIEW: ASLEEP AWAKE ASLEEP. BEFORE DIGITAL CAMERAS deluged us with thousands of images, there were slides: small squares of film mounted in a cardboard frame and loaded into a container, each slide in its own slot. As each image passed before the light of a projector, it […]

Truths, lies and looking in the mirror

BOOK REVIEW: BETRAYAL BY JONATHAN ANCER. IT’S EASY TO judge someone proven to be in the wrong, someone unmasked and publicly shamed. It’s easy to tut-tut about someone’s malleability in the face of complicated lures. It’s also easy to voice judgemental opinions through the gauze of history, and […]

Little girl with the face of an adult

REVIEW: AFRIKAANS RADIO DRAMA: DIE SWERFJARE VAN POPPIE NONGENA. THE POTENT TREASURE of the complicated situation of standing still in a place where history is in the making, turning and swirling on itself and all that it may mean to future generations feels particularly prescient in this age […]

No place like home

BOOK REVIEW: I WANT TO GO HOME FOREVER. WHAT IS A story? Knock on the scholarship of Carl Gustav Jung and you’ll discover that there are basically seven narrative plots in the world.  Look at the ongoing repertoire of some children’s theatres and you may believe that there […]

Sugar and spice; passion and fierceness

FILM REVIEW: LITTLE WOMEN WE LIVE IN a world which is characterised by a lack of credibility and stability. Fake news has taken over the media industry like a cancer, spouting disbelief in every crevice. Violence of both a literal and a figurative nature is perpetrated wherever we […]

The value Sylvia brings

BOOK REVIEW: TRANCEFORMATIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS BY SYLVIA GLASSER IT WAS A work that would shake everything from the parameters of dance in South Africa to the way in which contemporary black dancers confronted their medium. Indeed, dance ethnographer, choreographer and academic Sylvia Glasser’s watershed piece Tranceformations that evolved […]

SA satire, well below the panty line

THE FILTHY OBSCENITY of ratified apartheid legislation in South Africa put a very special and specific spin on the meaning of taboo. This was never pornography in the traditional sense, because that form of sexual gratification was deemed completely verboten. Rather, what you got under the apartheid regime […]