It's here....on 20 June 2010 Grahamstown will be filled with AMAZ!NG sounds, sights, lights, colours and creative spirit as the National Arts Festival gets under way.
So what's on the menu? With close on 500 productions being staged this year, it is impossible to cover everything on a single page. In the box on the right are PDFs of the complete kit or section-by-section downloads.
From 26 April you'll be able to go along to your nearest Standard Bank branch or select Computicket and Exclusive Books branches and pick up a dead-tree version of the kit in glorious technicolour (don't worry - the pages have been recycled once already, and can be again)
Meanwhile...here's a taste of some of our programme highlights.
This year's Festival will offer visitors a smorgasbord of national, continental and world premieres in theatre, dance, music and visual art. At the same time, some of South Africa's best productions over the past year have also been included in the programme to give international visitors a window into what gives South African art its vibrantly pulsating heartbeat.
Over the next few days we will be uploading new sections here - covering Music, Film, Jazz, the Fringe and more. For now here's an overview of our Theatre and Dance programmes for this year.
THEATRE
Theatre-lovers are in for an treat with 15 productions ranging from reinterpretations of the classics, to new cutting edge work that pushes the boundaries of theatre by allowing it to intersect with a broad range of new media.
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Heading the list of productions is Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre, Janni Younge, whose Ouroboros, a visually rich and exciting contemporary puppet theatre production about life, death and…tea. Using puppetry, projection and movement , Younge paints images through time and space, weaving together the lives of its two main characters as they encounter themselves and each other. This is a story of love, dreaming, imagination and death. |
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Guaranteed to take South African stage by storm before it has travels to Europe is South Africa's internationally renowned Market Theatre's presentation of the world premiere of Craig Higginson's new gripping psychological drama The Girl in the Yellow Dress that centres grippingly on a love story set in Paris between two apparently disparate characters --- one a U.K. teacher and the other her Congolese student. |
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Also a world premiere, is the Cape Town-based Magnet Theatre's Inxeba Lomphilisi (The wound of a Healer). Drawing its aesthetic from African traditions and urban rituals to explore the theme of identity and belonging, multiple stories of ordinary men and women, forgotten heroes, poets and freedom fighters are told through an interdisciplinary, multimedia production that takes place along the N2 road between Cape Town and the Eastern Cape. |
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Pushing the boundaries about identity and geography is Jaco Bouwer's award winning Afrikaans play, Skrapnel, in which he presents a compelling portrayal of a generation of Afrikaans youth who grapple with the issues of identity, belonging and confusion in a global shopping centre of sex, drugs and visas. |
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Award winning director and designer Marthinus Basson collaborates with celebrated actress Antoinette Kellerman to investigate the life of a woman who, during the depression of the 1930's in Germany, after her husband's untimely death, disguised herself as a man to take over his job at the factory where he used to work as a crane-driver. Translated from Manfred Karge's original German text by Anthony Vivis, Man to Man promises to be a worthy theatre experience, especially for the serious theatre-going audience. |
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The discerning theatre-goer will also be pleased that the National Arts Festival is bringing back actor Connor Lovett who mesmerised audiences last year in his interpretation of Samuel Beckett's First Love. This year, Lovett will once again offer an astonishing jewel of a performance and an absolutely riveting experience as he interprets without scenery or props, extracts from Beckett's great prose trilogy --- Molloy, Malone dies and The Unnamble. The visual simplicity of the productions reinforces Lovett's reputation as the greatest interpreter of Beckett's works which in this trilogy, he offers as a stripped-down solo performance of naked virtuosity. |
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Starting with the famous line, "now is the winter of our discontent …", Fred Abrahamse's The Really Small Theatre Company presents a production that will probably be remembered as the most innovative presentation of Richard III performed by a cast of only three actors. Marcel Meyer, David Dennis and Darren Aaujo are aided by the use of masks, headdresses, miniatures, puppets and audio visuals to engage the audience in a fast paced political thriller about despotic leaders who have risen to power; and which makes the play as relevant today as when written in its depiction of politics. |
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Human relations in tough political situations is at the heart of the South African premiere of The Timekeepers. Voted by the British Theatre Guide as one of the top five theatre shows in London, The Timekeepers is a deeply humanist work about an outrageously camp German homosexual and a conservative elderly Jewish man in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where they seem to have little in common, but the humour they share is a great weapon against suspicion and prejudice to give way to a touching friendship. |
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Drawing from her personal experiences as an aerobics instructor in a San Francisco City Jail, American artist Rhodessa Jones's Big Butt Girls Hard Headed Women poignantly and courageously tells the tale about the lives and times of real women who are incarcerated behind bars. She is accompanied on stage by by Idris Ackamoor, a multi-instrumentalist, composer, actor, tap dancer, and director whose signature performance is his uncanny ability to combine tap dancing with playing his saxophone simultaneously. |
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The Football Diaries is an engaging cross-disciplinary solo performance with Ahilan Ratnamohan, a young Australian / Shri-Lankan footballer who makes a direct and complex address to his intimate audience, taking them into a world where dreams and aspirations clash with jarring realities. He relates his endeavours to reach the games' physical extremes whilst seeking and failing to gain a professional players contract in Europe. This will be the South African premiere of this Australian production which wowed audiences and critics alike at the Sydney Festival. |
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Staying with soccer, the African continent's premiere of Football Football by Haris Pasovic captures all the vibrancy of the sport by combining dance, theatre, video, music and technology to allow the audience to be immersed in what is widely considered the most accessible game in the world. An international cast from Italy, Singapore, Bosnia, Slovenia and Burkina Faso make a high-pitched artistic team for this vigorously profound and entertaining production. |
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Collaboration between some of the finest creative minds is also the rationale for Neil Coppen's groundbreaking multi-media production Tree Boy as he employs a seamless mixture of stop-motion animation and shadow puppetry to produce a moving theatrical journey not to be missed. The musical score for Tree Boy is created and performed by Karen Van Pletsen and Guy Buttery. |
| Lovers of musical theatre will be delighted to experience a contemporary take of Dale Wasserman's Man of La Mancha which uses the classic novel Don Quixote as a jumping off place, as it originally told the story of Quixote's author, Miguel de Cervantes and his courage in standing up to the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. Under the acute directing of musical theatre maestro, Themi Venturas, Man of La Mancha is set in a in a new context where criminals and a few riotous students arrested after mayhem at the Ballito 'rage' are held together in the overcrowded backyard of the Ballito Police station. |
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No musical theatre programme could ever be complete without the inclusion of some South African legends, in this case in the Market Theatre's Songs of Migration, created by internationally acclaimed trumpeter, composer and lyricist Hugh Masekela and written and directed by award-winning director James Ngcobo. Songs of Migration features the multi-talented, soulful and dynamic Sibongile Khumalo to rewind the tape and tell stories about South African music and history drawing on rich musical scenes on the train that was seen as a separator of lovers, breaking up families as it moved raw materials to and from the ports for imports and exports. |
With a total of 15 theatre productions on the Main programme of the National Arts Festival and drawing on the talents of artists from 15 different countries, the National Arts Festival's 15 days of Amazing is certain to establish a reputation that Grahamstown is the one place in South Africa's where the world's best creative minds will gather to offer theatre lovers the escape from all other distractions.
DANCE
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Dance enthusiasts are in for an equally enthraling visit to the Festival. Standard Bank Young Artist for Dance, Mlu Zondi, has been acclaimed on several platforms for his virtuosity to drawinspiration from many sources. The premiere of his Cinema intersects with so many genres that it pushes the boundaries of what can traditionally be defined as dance. |
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In San, internationally celebrated South African dancer and choreographer Vincent Mantsoe magnetically draws his audiences into a mesmerising production which has its music inspired from the works of the Persian poet, Mowlana Jalaludin Rumi. The dance piece is an iconic journey into the soul of the San who are considered to be oldest inhabitants of the African continent. |
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Former Standard Bank Young Artist winner Acty Tang noted for his avant-garde approach to choreography present his dance installation Inscrutable in an unusually non-conventional dance space as he recreates what can be considered to be his most autobiographical work probing his search for identity in his journey from China to South Africa. |
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Festival favourite Dada Masilo returns with her firmly established dance signature to reinterpret the classics. From her eclectic Romeo and Juliet to her high powered Carmen, Masilo gives a fascinatingly refreshing presentation of the well loved classic, Swan Lake. |
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Lovers of classical ballet will not be disappointed. The Cape Town Ballet Theatre which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year will offer Festival-goers a marvellously entertaining Sleeping Beauty. |
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The sounds of castanets and the sight of swirling dresses will be the scene in the La Rosa Dance Theatre Company's Sentimientos. Just the word evokes moods of high passion and emotion that will sway from one extreme to the next. |
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In a similar vein, but closer to home, stomping feet, hand clapping and music from indigenous instruments will be the call that will beckon international visitors to take a peep into the rich cultural diversity of the tribes that lives in the Eastern Cape's rural mountains. The Eastern Cape Ensemble is an armchair tour into the dances and the music of of the AmaBaca, AmaGcalexa and the Ama Pondo tribes. |
Webcam courtesy of 
Complete Main Programme 