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Art on the Walls and in the Streets

PRESS RELEASE
Released 10 May 2010

“Arts for all” is going to be the rallying cry at this year’s bumper National Arts Festival, 20 June – 4 July, where five exciting street theatre productions will hit the streets of Grahamstown, promising to offer a rich cultural experience in which all can join freely.

“Street theatre is a vital art form at the National Arts Festival. This year’s programme is a colourful celebration which challenges the pre-defined structures of walls and stages,” said Festival Director Ismail Mahomed. “It offers a place to re-invent the relationships between art and audience, and it will most certainly be the place where the audience gets to perform, dance, sing along and celebrate with the artists,” he added.

Kicking off this year’s Street Theatre programme, is Amathole, produced by the U.K.-based Dodgy Clutch Company together with artists from the Eastern Cape. The production is a magical mixture aimed at family audiences and the artistic cognoscenti alike. It brims with high energy, dance, music and song and will be staged as a procession with vibrant costumes and brilliant puppetry to create more than just a carnival. It is a theatrical event on the move where the normal boundaries of performers and spectators become blurred.

After stomping their huge feet firmly in the Grahamstown soil last year, a group of giant puppets will once again return to the Festival with the support of the French Institute of South Africa and the Gauteng Provincial Government. This year, the amplified group of 32 giant puppets, each measuring up to four meters high, with masks and other props, will spice up the atmosphere and entertain the crowds. The Giant Match is created as a South African allegory of Romeo and Juliet, with its story of two young lovers kept apart by the feud between their two families, culminating in an epic and comic football match, before the two parties are reconciled and the couple happily wed.

Two South African artists whose signature style is performing in public spaces, Ellis Pearson and Sdumo Mtshali, will bring out their uncanny skill of enchanting the audiences in Man Up a Tree.

In Undoing, avant-garde artists Frauke, Givan Lötz and Vincent Truter will use costumes designed by Black Coffee to produce a Japanese butoh performance series that will pop up unannounced in various public spaces.

Adding to the excitement in public spaces will be the Festival’s home-grown Phezulu Stiltwalkers  and the Arkworks Eco-Puppets.

This year’s Festival will close with a massive spectacle presented with the support of the Italian Institute of Culture. Angeli e Demoni is an extravagant show with lighting effects, pyrotechnical orchestrations and smokescreens that creates a fairytale suitable for both children and adults. Knights, ogres, humanoids, warrior maidens and mercenaries of the underworld will travel uncharted roads and create fiery images of serpents, dragons, gigantic marionettes, gateways, mirrors, swords and edged weapons of all types, flaming walls, crowns, skirts and fans, claws and wings appear drawn in fire. This South African premiere of Angeli e Demoni is the work of Pietro Chiarenza, an internationally celebrated Italian theatre director, playwright and designer who specialises in street, circus and open-air theatre.

It is not just the streets of Grahamstown that will be filled with the energy of the arts. The walls and exhibition spaces throughout the city will also be adorned with the works of top national and international exhibiting artists.

Heading the visual arts exhibition line up at the Festival is Standard Bank Young Artist Michael MacGarry whose exhibition Endgame punctuates just why this dynamic young artist, whose creativity has no boundaries, puts contemporary South African art so respectfully in international galleries.

Mexico celebrates two historical milestones in its political history this year. South African photographer Damien Schumann prolifically captures some of the contradictions on the border between Mexico and the U.S. in his exhibition, Borderline.

Issues of interrogating identity shaped by political ideology is also the essence of Mary Sibande’s exhibition, Long live the dead Queen. Rosemarie Marriot’s exhibition Relaas …  she “plays” with a combination of human and imaginary forms to create a body of sculptures, made from found objects and natural materials. The redemptive quality of giving renewed life to dead or discarded objects is a primary motivation in her work.

Grahamstown-based artist Rat Western locates her exhibition Dead Media in the Albany Natural Sciences Museum. Whilst her work interrogates trends in the way museums curate their work, her exhibition is also intended to attract audiences into this part of the museum to which arts festival visitors rarely go.

The Keiskamma Arts Project which has a earned strong reputation for its work with rural women will produce the African Guernica, a symbolic take on Picasso’s Guernica. The Keiskamma’s work will focus on the way in which the AIDS pandemic continues to ravage through the Eastern Cape.

Biko, The Quest for a True Humanity is presented at the Festival in co-operation with the Apartheid Museum and the Steve Biko Foundation. In Films Must be Physical, the camera lens is sharpened on the work of filmmaker Werner Hertzog. In tandem with the exhibition the Festival’s film programme will include two of his features.

Sigwesile is the brand name of the Eastern Cape Department of Sports, Recreation, Arts & Culture’s 2010 visual arts exhibition.  Rural crafters and artists from the Eastern Cape will exhibit and demonstrate their skills during the Festival.

Bookings for this year’s “15 Days of Amaz!ing” opened on 26 April. Tickets are available through Computicket. Booking kits available from selected Standard Bank Branches, selected Exclusive Books and all Computickets. For more information on the programme, accommodation and travel options visit www.nationalartsfestival.co.za. Also join the National Arts Festival group on Facebook for all the latest competitions and news, or follow the Festival on Twitter.

The National Arts Festival is sponsored by Standard Bank, The Eastern Cape Government, The National Arts Council, The National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund, The Sunday Independent and M Net.

Ends

About the National Arts Festival: The National Arts Festival, now in its 36th year, has proved its sustainability and has grown to be one of the leading arts festivals in southern Africa. Its objectives are to deliver excellence; encourage innovation and development in the arts by providing a platform for both established and emerging South African artists; create opportunities for collaboration with international artists; and build new audiences.

ISSUED BY        :        THE FAMOUS IDEA TRADING CC
ON BEHALF OF    :        NATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL, GRAHAMSTOWN
CONTACT        :        GILLY HEMPHILL /CILNETTE PIENAAR
TEL            :        021 886 4900
CELL            :        082 820 8584
EMAIL            :        gilly@thefamousidea.co.za