Theatre gets physical at the Fest
28 June 2006
Dance, clowning, improvisation, theatre and mime combine as the 2006 National Arts Festival Fringe, taking place in Grahamstown from 29 June to 8 July, gets decidedly physical.
The Bonfire Theatre Company uses music, some costumes, a couple of props and dynamic theatrical skill to transform audience members' stories - without script, score or rehearsal - into mini stage productions in the blink of an eye.
Why is Mrs Popczieski fishing for a blue whale in a tin bathtub on a forgotten island where no foreigners ever go? Catch Scott Sparrow's The Performers Travel Guide if you want to find out. Nicholas Ellenbogen describes Sparrow as "undoubtedly one of the great talents to emerge from Rhodes' Physical Theatre stable. A born entertainer."
Craig Morris' solo performance
piece Blood Orange, directed by Greig Coetzee, is "a zany South African Catcher in the Rye" that tells the story of a boy with an out-of-sync way of seeing the world. Morris' other presentation, Hero, offers a more vigorous physicality as Captain Bliksem and the Fris Four set out to conquer Evil.
In Serotonin Productions' Surfacing, choreographer Mongi Mthombeni and director Yve Pelser take the audience into a desolate family landscape where a mother and her daughters move in and out of memory time-zones to confront an unearthly tradition.
Coal Yard tells the story of a boy who runs away from home because his father sexually abuses him. The Masutsa Dance Theatre Company production, a hit at the 2006 Market Theatre Laboratory's Zwakala Festival, was described in The Sunday World as having established "yet another uniquely South African way of telling a story."
Makhosi Dlamini's Crossroad Boy is a hard-hitting one-man show about
death on South African roads, performed by Lindani Dlamini using a mixture of physical theatre and storytelling.
First Physical Theatre's Vrypas, directed by Heike Gehring with choreography by Gary Gordon and narration by Francois Toerien, strings fragments of a life together - diary entries, newspaper cuttings, poetry - to take the audience on a journey through a gay man's psyche.
The First Physical Student and Youth companies, under the direction of Gary Gordon, also present their showcase New Voices 2006 at this year's festival.
16 Kinds of Emptiness, a collaboration between choreographer Juanita Finestone-Praeg, artist Tanya Poole and writer Leonard Praeg, explores the concept of emptiness through conversations between light and sound, bodies and images. This première production features guest performers Acty Tang, Gary Gordon and Sheena Stannard.
Theatre Bazaar and Black Laugh Productions take an entirely fresh approach to Athol Fugard's
1980s classic A Place with the Pigs, a two-hander based on the true story of a Russian army deserter in the Second World War who returns home to spend the next 40 years hiding in a pigsty.
Arthur Miller's text also gets a new take in the Mohlakeng Theatre Organisation's The Crucible, directed by Sam aka Sparara Modieginyana and featuring Sfiso Zimba.
Acty Tang's site-specific solo performance piece The Silent Wail of Melisande, inspired by the Japanese dance form butoh and drawing from Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist play Pelleas and Melisande, is physical theatre at its choreographic best.
The festival is sponsored by the Eastern Cape government, Standard Bank, the SABC, the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund and the National Arts Council.
Business & Arts South Africa has also made a special grant to the festival this year. The major portion goes to the artists on the festival fringe, the rest to festival newspaper Cue, the
Youth Audience Development Project and the Art-Walk Meander Map.
For more information, see the related articles on the right - and visit the National Arts Festival website.
SouthAfrica.info reporter
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