How to find your place in the world: RIP Maxine Denys

PETITE YET FEISTY, full of passion and dance knowledge, Maxine Denys held the flame for classical ballet with an innate sense of dynamite. But more than just dance technique, she was a woman of wit and charisma, who not only gave Sleeping Beauty’s Carabosse the verve she requires, […]

Who’s your Marmee?

WHAT IS IT with the broad public – strangers on the bus – when they encounter something out of their experiences and need to poke at it? Maxine, in episode 15 of The End of the Line, a series of British fictional monologues on podcast, ponders this issue, […]

Why you should fear the media

FROM THE SINISTER complexity of its cover, to its end pages, Anton Harber’s 2020 publication So, for the Record is a vital essay on the current state of journalism in South Africa. And it’s not a pretty picture. This publication should be present on the bookshelves of anyone […]

Portrait of Fietas, with heart

SOMETIMES WHEN YOU think your dream opportunity has finally presented itself, you’re rudely given to understand that the universe has a whole different narrative plotted for you. The sequel to Craig Freimond’s 2012 film Material, called New Material, released nationally on 26 November. It will have you reaching […]

No place like home

IT IS NOT every day that a story has the potency to leap off the page and into the rhythms of your heartbeat, regardless of how it has been written or presented. Estelle Neethling has experience as a writer of profiles, not books. But when Adolphine Misekabu crossed […]

Look, deeper

SHE’S LOOKING AT you peripherally, her face fierce and focused in profile, a pencil in her hand. She’s a woman who has waited her turn in a schoolroom in Kampala, Uganda. For generations. But she’s more than just a reflection of education and abandonment, of culture and sexism. […]

To my someone who listens

WHEN YOU GET down and dirty with your own talent, you experience something otherworldly. It’s like being in love. It’s like looking in the mirror. It’s like pushing yourself beyond your own ability to disparage what you can do, when you really allow yourself to open your wings […]