IT TAKES IMMENSE skill and maturity to know that the telling of a story filled with detail and drama, with interstices of horror and loss and replete with almost 60-year-old ghosts is done not with gimmicks and tricks, with big noise and flashing lights, but with an old […]
LISTEN TO THE first few lyrics of Sodade, a song written in the 1950s which was popularised and rose to meteoric cultural proportions in the early 1990s, and you will know exactly who Cesária Évora was – or at least, you will know her voice, which runs like […]
PICTURE THE SCENARIO. A performance of Gustav Mahler’s first symphony, the Titan, composed in 1888, is about to begin. The bassoonists stand poised, the trumpets in the wings. All due time hewn established pomp and ceremony is de rigueur; performers are in black. The audience is quiet, in […]
CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA. A land under the thumb of a relentless dictator. A land, seemingly on a crash course that might take the whole world with it. But what if you had the opportunity to shift that crash course? What if that opportunity came with the ultimate price tag? […]
THE THRILL OF taking a well-heeled classic for a spin on the contemporary circuit can be astonishing, if you are able to get under the skin of what makes it tick. And what has made it tick for hundreds of years. This is exactly what happens in Autumn […]
THE BIBLICAL ENORMITY of oceanic mischief and what the sea, in a fury, can do to you, is something that has long been the energy that pushes forward creative pens. It’s ineffable and so big that it is beyond our egotistic ability to contain or tame it. Picking […]
SOMETIMES MAGIC LURKS in an association between an established art gallery, the vagaries age and the possibilities that thinking out of the box can yield. For just a couple more days, the SA Association of Arts in Pretoria hosts a rather extraordinary little contemplation on what it means […]
GRAVE ILLNESS IS a strange thing. It shifts your understanding of places in your heart that you are scared to think about: Places that you consider taboo, until they are in your face and you have no alternative. And it educates you in ways you could never have […]
VERY OCCASIONALLY, YOU may be lucky enough to come across a piece of radio theatre which makes you remember why the wireless has unequivocal superiority over the slippery slick ostensibly perfect technology our world is heir to, on digital film. Albert Short’s spooky Afrikaans-language work Naand Josef, which […]
IN THESE DAYS of earth-shattering news from every quarter, you might have news-fatigue. You might find yourself aimlessly scrolling through social media, not allowing your eye to catch on things that will tear holes in your sense of hope. And further to all of that, you might find […]
Recent Comments