I thought I dreamed it. I remember the words “Theatre is dead in SA” on a street pole advert in black type on a while background under the dark blue logo of a weekly national paper, a few days ago in Johannesburg. And I filed the recollection of […]
Corrupting Noel Coward’s lyrics a bit but celebrating the intent of his 1947 song that warns a woman against putting her child needlessly on the stage, I cock a snook at the young mommies and daddies who bring their relatively freshly-hatched babies, still in swaddling clothes to the […]
They bray like donkeys when a performer makes a move they’ve never seen before. They clap hysterically at any pause in the music or the movement, assuming this is their cue. They give standing ovations for anything at all. These are our people: South African audiences might have […]
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, […]
“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 […]
Does someone in the audience actually have to die in the context of contemporary dance before the dance establishments take notice of how audiences are being abused? Or should audiences of a festival like Dance Umbrella be restricted to young academics, who are under 40, physically robust and […]
Writing is difficult. It’s a constant balancing act between spelling, grammar, content and structure. And then it’s about your reader, and your intentions: do you want to bamboozle them and chase them away with your assumptions of erudition, or do you want to seduce them into seeing your […]
Should there be such a thing as a woman rabbi? Is it an archaic misinterpretation to force Muslim women to enter a mosque through a separate entrance to men? How does the Baha’i faith interrogate women’s rights? And where does the Christian trinity stand in relation to women […]
They’re big. They’re shiny. They’re funky and puerile and they’ve gotten the local art world into a frenzy. This is Cape Town-based Michael Elion’s sculpture ‘Perceiving Freedom’, a gigantic pair of sunglasses, bedecking the public space on the Sea Point promenade in Cape Town. Having been asked to […]
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