Visiting the National Arts Festival is almost guaranteed to make one's experience a slight anti-climax after doing the ‘Grand Tour’. However, not many get to add Grahamstown to their Grand Tour list, for this reason I am pleased that my first National Arts Festival was this year. This post follows after over a week since the close of the National Arts Festival, but hey I’ve been trying to settle in after being away from home for a month.

I was in Grahamstown for work (overseeing Ruth Sack’s ‘High Tea at the Plaza' as part of Jay Pather’s ‘Fresh II’ and other more enjoyable employment that arose once I had arrived) as a result I didn’t get to see as many shows as I would have liked to.



It feels a bit strange to talk about Jay Pather’s ‘Fresh II’ as I had worked on it, but the show caused some hype (five sell out shows) in the little saintly town .
Much of the buzz created by Fresh II was due to the Pather’s mix of dance, physical theatre, music and performance brought together in a beautiful venue. The pieces where viewed in different areas of the space and the audiences moved to different rooms to see the various pieces. It seemed like Pather got just the right amount of spectacle, play and seriousness to create a piece that allowed the individual performances to complement one another.
But just maybe the hype had something to do with the inclusion of one of Durban’s finest dancers naked in one of the pieces. I was assigned the job of filming his piece from a little room where he performed, audiences only got to see the piece via a live feed in a room upstairs. I heard that some audience members walked out at this point at a couple of the shows, I could never imagine why : )


I was pleased that I finally got to see a Brett Bailey production, I was eager to see what the so-called visual master had to offer. Orfeus was set in a quarry just behind Rhodes’ sculpture department, we were met by the narrator at the gates to the quarry where we were urged to remain silent for our time in the quarry. The observation of silence made me more aware of the sounds and space that we were entering. It was a beautiful setting, which made everything seem more beautiful. The main ‘stage’ was set in front of a huge rock face. When the play moved on into the underworld as Orfeus went in search of Euripides, the audience followed a guide through large fires and trod over bones into the ‘underworld’. One of the characters was tied up and writhed trying to escape, this created a large shadow which was cast onto the rock face behind him creating a fascinating piece of shadow puppetry. Wow! When we met the shoemakers in the underworld I could not help think that it looked very much like another Jane Alexander (Remember Alexander’s Butcher Boys in Bailey’s Macbeth), ‘Security / Segurança’ this time perhaps? Orfeus was beautiful and definitely lived up to my expectations of Bailey’s work.

Being a theatre philistine, I only saw the rock stars of the South African theatre world Brett Bailey, Mark Fleishman and of course Jay Pather.
After returning to a traditional theatre space to see Fleishman’s Cargo, it all felt very academic as though all the research sat on the surface of the play.
The Site specific works seemed far more engaging, except for Pieter Van Heerden’s ‘6 minutes’ which left me wondering whether it was entirely necessary to torment yourself by performing a rape scene in the nude at midnight or submerging yourself into a bag of animal entrails on a freezing Grahamstown night. I am not sure I could read much beyond the forced shock value.

The visual arts seem to take the back seat in Grahamstown but nonetheless I did get to see the worst exhibition I’ve yet to see. A friend of mine on Skype later remarked much to my dismay that it is probably the first of many, I do not look forward them.

‘What Lies beneath’ a show by Durban duo called Mark and Clint is the worst show I have ever seen.

Viewers had to navigate the dioramas of the Settlers museum to arrive to the show, which appropriately lay beneath the dioramas. After passing a range of dioramas the viewer was met with Organza drapes. Yes drapes! The work would probably have been a lot different had it been presented better, I just could not forgive the hand written stick on labels. The kitsch Indian aesthetic didn’t bother me as much as that the works all hung at different angles. I heard that the duo are wedding planners by day, luckily they displayed their email and contacts clearly in the space should anyone be looking for wedding planners in the near future.




James Webb and Peter Hugo’s work sat a bit more subtly, maybe it is the art/drama divide, or perhaps because they chose to leave out the silk organza and animal entrail. Webb’s use of space was apt for his Black Passage recording, there was not too much visible intervention . Having seen so many sound pieces in the last month that conform to a particular contemporary style, it was nice to see that Webb’s work held it’s own aesthetic.



I am not usually a fan of Hugo’s work so I was pleasantly surprised by his new body of work, ‘Messina/ Musina’. It felt more honest; it seemed to acknowledge the tradition of documentary photographers in this country. His influences where present Goldblatt, Tillim and strangely a bit of Ballen (although not a documentary photographer as such). His prints where beautiful, the scale monumentalized his subjects and it was refreshing not to see the standard Pigment ink on cotton paper resolution. The framed glossy prints where rich and seductive.

The cold nights and ‘The Long Table’ where not missed on my return , a few days short of a week was more than enough time spent in Grahamstown for the festival.

(ArtHeat is not accountable for any dastardly emails/calls to Mark and Clint. We wouldn't however condemn it...ed)

Labels: brett bailey, grahamstown, james webb, jay pather, mark fleischmann, national arts festival, Pieter Hugo, ruth sacks