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Cutting-edge theatre at the Arts Fest

17 May 2010

A total of 15 theatre productions, drawing on the talents of artists from 15 different countries, are on offer on the main programme of the 2010 National Arts Festival taking place in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape from 20 June to 4 July.

Intersections between puppetry, digital images and sounds, workshop productions and newly written scripts offer a smorgasbord of stimulating intellectual engagement, in a programme is crammed with South African, continental and world premieres.

Created, designed and directed by Janni Younge, 2010 Standard Bank Young Artist Winner for Theatre, Ouroboros is a story of love, dreaming, imagination and death. Using puppetry, projection and movement, the play paints images as it moves through time and space, weaving together the lives of its two main characters as they encounter themselves and each other.

Sogo Visual Theatre creates visually rich and exciting theatrical projects that convey meaning using diverse mediums to communicate beyond words. With sound design by Neo Muyanga, wardrobe by Hillette Stapelberg, mentoring by Janice Honeyman (directing) and Illka Lowe (set and costumes), and with Jason Potgieter, Cindy Mkaza, Gabriel Marchand, Tali Cervati, Berin Belknap and Alude Mahali in the cast.

History is filled with despotic leaders who have risen to power and then succumbed to megalomania, paranoia and corruption. The RStC (Really Small Theatre Company) explores this theme in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Richard III, starring Darron Araujo, David Dennis and Marcel Meyer. The play is a fast-paced political thriller usng the protean talents of this small company of three actors aided by inventive design concepts, striking visuals, masks, costumes and puppetry, with direction, set and lighting design by Fred Abrahamse, costume design by Marcel Meyer and photography by Fiona Macpherson.

Drawing its aesthetic from African traditions and urban rituals to explore the theme of identity and belonging, a new work from Magnet Theatre, Inxeba lomphilisi (The wound of a healer), directed by Mandla Mbothwe and Faniswa Yisa, tells multiple stories through an interdisciplinary, multimedia production that takes place along the N2 road between Cape Town and the Eastern Cape.

At the heart of the production is a very old woman who has been on the N2 for many years. She is the conduit for other people's stories – stories of departure and return. She struggles to connect them, to make them coherent, to repair the damage of endless separation, and as she struggles these stories become part of her. They are the stories of ordinary men and women, forgotten heroes, poets and freedom fighters. Inxeba lomphilisi (The wound of a healer) is performed in Xhosa, and explores various strategies of translation into English.

Friendships of the deepest nature are formed between the most unlikely people in the most unlikely places. Ocean of Sugar presents Dan Clancy's The Timekeepers at the Festival this year. Described by the British Theatre Guide as one of top five theatre shows in London, it is a story of men in a concentration camp who bond through lessons in watch repairs and a love for opera, starring Roy Horovitz as Hans, Rami Baruch as Benjamin and Kobi Livne as Capo, directed by Lee Gilat.

It is a moving and intense piece of theatre that looks beyond the relationship between the main characters to question isolation and understanding in communities, and has been touring international festivals since 2004. The Timekeepers is a call for tolerance and understanding, and is presented at the National Arts Festival with support from the Embassy of Israel.

The South African State Theatre presents Rivonia Trial, written for the stage by Aubrey Sekhabi, Mandla Dube and Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom, and directed by Aubrey Sekhabi. This is the story about the infamous trial that led to the long imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and others.

Although the play is written and devised from actual court transcripts, it is not just a restaging of the original trial, but a dramatic work that serves to illuminate what the African people were fighting for and the bravery of those that chose to lead the fight. The whole play and story has been envisaged as a thrilling court-room drama that rings true and yet is philosophical and profound.

Catalina Theatre and TheatreBIZ brings Man of La Mancha, the Story of Don Quixote to the main stages of the Festival. With a talented cast of 17, including Cobus Venter as Don Quixote and Liam Magner as Sancho, directed by Themi Venturas, Dale Wasserman's script uses the classic novel Don Quixote as a springboard, 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.

TheatreBIZ has set the musical in a new context where criminals and a few riotous students arrested after mayhem at the Ballito "rage" at being held together in the overcrowded backyard of the Ballito Police station. Written in the turbulent 1960s, it explores the price paid for the losses of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Performed at the National Arts Festival by arrangement with DALRO, with support from the National Arts Council and the Ethekwini Municipality.

The story of Tree Boy, written and designed by Neil Coppen and directed by Libby Allen, is something akin to a banyan tree, spreading its branches and sending its many roots into the earth. It is a story about remembering and forgetting, hope and hopelessness, Billie Holiday and barflies, B-grade sci-fi and fireflies, trees and tragedies.

Set in the South Africa of the 1960s, the relationships between three men are explored through employing a seamless mixture of live performance, stop-motion and digital animation and shadow puppetry. Twelve-year-old Benjamin Sprout and his father are forced to relocate from their rustic property in the mountains to a burgeoning mining town in the Transvaal after the death of the boy's mother. When young Benjamin's father retreats into the paralysis of liquor and memory, the young boy finds solace in an over-grown forest on the fringes of the town, where he encounters an enigmatic elderly gardener with whom he discovers a new world, one in which story and hope sow revolutionary seeds of change in the boy.

TEATERteater presents Manfred Karge’s Man To Man with celebrated South African actress Antoinette Kellerman, directed and designed by Marthinus Basson and produced by Hugo Theart. Audiences can be assured of a gripping one-woman tour de force that investigates the life of a woman who, after the untimely death of her husband during the economic disaster of the Weimar period, takes over his identity to make a living as a crane-operator at the factory where he used to work.

From this position she observes the grand sweep of history, the rise of Nazism, the 2nd World War, the division and the reconstruction of Germany. Her insights from her life leave her with many questions about love, the status of women, the value of survival and the nature of a male dominated society. Man to Man is a co-production by the National Arts Festival, ABSA KKNK and Woordfees.

Gare St Lazare presents the South African première of The Beckett Trilogy, compiled by Conor Lovett and Judy Hegarty Lovett from the novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett. Molloy, a crippled tramp, tells of the hilarious attempt to visit his mother and introduces us to one of Beckett’s most poignant and arresting characters. Malone is about to die and to while away the days he attempts to tell himself stories but he can't quite get them to take off. Finally he loses himself in a whirlwind story that could be a cross between Tarentino and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

The Unnamable then dispenses altogether with story, or so it seems. This is where Beckett's vision is most honest and brutal yet full of beauty, as the unnamed narrator struggles with his own existence and how story cannot help him understand it any better. Beckett's Trilogy is presented a t the National Arts Festival with support from Culture Ireland.

In a year dominated by soccer, the African premier of Football, Football, written and directed by Haris Pašoviæ, explores through dance, theatre, video, music and technology the art of the "beautiful game". Strict rules meet chaos, and geometry meets the wildly free movements in this simple game. What many humans describe as divine is, at the same time, the most accessible practice in the world.

An international cast (Italy, Singapore, Bosnia, Slovenia) and Singaporean creative team make a high-pitched artistic team of this vigorous, profound and entertaining production. A surprise guest on stage makes it even more exciting. Co-produced by East West Theatre Company (Sarajevo – Bosnia and Herzegovina), Napoli Teatro Festival (Italy) and Singapore Arts Festival, in partnership with Les Ballets C de la B and in association with Flota (Slovenia).

Urban Theatre Projects presents The Football Diaries, written and performed by Ahilan Ratnamohan, a meditation on art and sport in which an engaging personal story emerges with new dance, popular culture and contemporary life in Australia and Europe.

The narrative, drawn from Ratnamohan’s own journal writings, combined with his virtuoso soccer skills, gives the audience an insight into an athlete’s experience of space, time and emotion. He relates his endeavors to reach the game's physical extremes while seeking and failing to gain a professional players contract in Europe. Presented by the National Arts Festival with the kind support of the Australian High Commission, South Africa.

Tripletake Productions presents Athol Fugard's Hello & Goodbye, with Michael Maxwell as Johnnie and Dorothy Ann Gould as Hester. Set in the kitchen of a railway house in Port Elizabeth in 1963, the play softly cauterizes the wounded lives of its characters. The encounter between brother and sister all but destroys any vestiges of familial love that have survived unacknowledged in their existences. Hello and Goodbye is classic Fugard set in the environment in which he grew up amongst the ironies, dichotomies and pain of South African life under apartheid.

Guaranteed to take South African stage by storm before it has travels to Europe is the Market Theatre's presentation of the world premiere of Craig Higginson's new psychological drama The Girl in the Yellow Dress, that centres on a love story set in Paris between a British teacher and her Congolese student.

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.

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 tackles the lives and times of real women incarcerated behind bars. She is accompanied on stage 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 the saxophone.

No musical theatre programme could ever be complete without the inclusion of South African legends Hugh Masekela and Sibongile Khumalo gracing the stage of the National Arts Festival. 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, the multi-talented Sibongile Khumalo rewinds the tape on 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 country's ports.

Now in its 36th year, South Africa's National Arts Festival is one of the leading arts festivals in southern Africa. Tickets for all shows are available through Computicket.

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

For more information, visit www.nationalartsfestival.co.za.

Source: National Arts Festival