Life, death, betrayal and the heaviness of loss were brought onstage to Johannesburg high school students in the form of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Armed with pure use of period language, a deep understanding of purpose and meaning and a rich clarity of narrative, they were perfect.
Ziaphora Dakile, Kitty Moepang and Barileng Malebye take hold of this script which forces them into the personas of many: old and young, black and white, good and evil, with sophisticated empathy. Vying between English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa, it uses idioms that you understand from your intestines, if not grammatically.
You must see ‘The Piano Lesson’ because of Lerato Mvelase as Berniece and Warren Masemola as Lymon. Masemola, all limbs and voice, carries his character, an outsider to the unfolding family tale, with engaging lightness. Mvelase plays a woman with a deep sense of injustice she’s not afraid to use.
With her impish gap-toothed grin and her sprite-like existence onstage and in the interstices of the stories she told, fearless and impetuous dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo leaves a brilliant legacy that radically shifted an understanding of what dance from South Africa can and should be, anywhere in the world.
WHAT WOULD YOU do if you were lucky enough find one of five golden tickets that will offer you access to the heart of the best made chocolate in all the land? The premise of Roald Dahl’s classic tale, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is one of wonder […]
AS THE TRADITIONAL heavy velvet curtains part and the sheer magic of Grant Knottenbelt’s set, with all its bells and whistles, cobbled pathways and Italian provincial signs appear, a hush that signifies young people’s awareness of the imminence of magic, descends over the audience. But the intake of […]
IT WAS THE late Alan Crump, Chairman of the National Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown, during the 1990s, who used to quip about the so-called “blue rinse and boiling sweet brigade”, who the festival organisers had to take seriously because they represented a money backbone of the […]
IT’S RELATIVELY EASY to mesmerise an audience, with shiny objects and surprising gestures, but what does it take to hold them transfixed? In Off Balance, Mlindeli Zondi and Jack Moloi present a work about being black in a white world, that is rich in cynicism, sprinkled with hard-edged […]
WHEN YOU ARE able to be present in a huge concrete interior in which one woman and her voice can with clear authority, take control of the whole space, with a packed audience and a vault that reaches storeys into the sky, you know you are in the […]
DO YOU REMEMBER the cultural imperative in South Africa? The thing that you had to see, at all costs, whether it was an opera or an exhibition, a performance or an event? Kentridge’s The Head and the Load evokes this artistic urgency among South Africans, that is at […]
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