Category: Robyn Sassen

Tales of sound and fury, signifying everything

TAKE AN ALREADY angry and energetic approach to art making with a political edge, and exacerbate it with shoddy politics, unethical behaviour and the distressing circulation of the notion of ‘alternative facts’ in the country and the world, and you get Blessing Ngobeni’s current solo exhibition – the seventh […]

My body, my heroism

THERE’S A DENSE stillness articulated in the tough and unselfconscious photographs of performer Oupa Sibeko in his solo exhibition iQhawe. But as you look, you realise there is considerably more to these heroic images, cast pristinely onto a white background, which situate the artist in traditional reeds or nakedly. […]

The man who could fly

HE SITS AT the piano and caresses it into life, like a god. Like a demon. Like a godly demon or a demonic god. Sometimes he looks maniacal and deformed at other times, like a sprite, who could at any moment leap the constraints of gravity and fly away. […]

Arm wrestling with giants

THEATRE IS TRULY a magical medium. In casting fictional glances at real characters, it can unstitch the raw underbody of a myriad of political what-ifs and set your beliefs on edge. Playwright Jeff Stetson has woven a conversation between US Civil Rights heroes, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King […]

Forever Bach

HEAD OF PIANO at the Royal Academy of Music in London, Joanna MacGregor (b. 1959) knew from her early childhood that piano was her first love. Prior to her arrival in Johannesburg, she responded to questions from My View about the flamboyance and fierceness but also the humour of […]

The Universe in a Musical Chord

MUSIC WASN’T THE first life choice of this year’s Composer in Residence for the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival. It was physics. Indeed, Neo Muyanga (b. 1974), calls music the mistress he serves under duress. He told My View about music’s grammar, 14th century madrigals and what ‘folk’ means, as […]