Performance Review

Standard Bank National Arts Festival

The Grahamstown Festival reflects the South African political and artistic climate as well as its theatre. This year, a greater prevalence of African-language productions drew more black spectators. Initiatives to arrange promotional tickets, to increase the number of performances given at the still meager number of township venues, and to offer festival accommodation in the township next year, may further improve accessibility and profit-sharing. While so many of South Africa's citizens wait for housing, jobs, and education to materialize from the rhetoric of nation-building, the residents of Grahamstown's townships have yet to gain full participation in the National Arts Festival.

One opportunity for participation came through Brett Bailey, who recruited performers for his company, Third World Bunfight, from the greater Grahamstown area. Third World Bunfight's two performances, Heartstopping and Ipi Zombi, enjoyed success tempered by controversy. At once confronting festival authorities and Grahamstown's English colonial history, Brett Bailey's site-specific (or, rather, site-to-be-determined) work, Heartstopping, made for one of the most engaging pieces of the festival. Originally intended for the Old Grahamstown Quarry, Heartstopping was canceled by festival authorities because of safety concerns. The Quarry had been chosen to represent the cave in the Eastern Cape where the performers had traveled to find the "spirit" of the work. To avoid a second cancellation, Bailey kept his new site a secret. Audience members met Bailey at the Grahamstown train station, an apt location to begin what Bailey considers the journeying process of drama. After a brief introduction, Bailey asked the audience to keep silent as he led them over to a graveyard which held the remains of colonial settlers. Instead of communing with their own ancestors, the actors were instructed to try to make peace with colonial antecedents.

At the outset, the graveyard was empty except for five tall "cocoons" of newspaper and an overturned trash can. A figure slowly emerged from behind the can, raised a mallet, and began to strike a steady, even beat. The beat and the drummer's grim facial expression remained constant throughout, accompanied by the regular low moan of kudu horns. Other figures gradually appeared from behind gravestones and out of the long grass. Tongues and hands painted red, and silver tin-foil hearts affixed to the chest augmented yellowish-white body paint used in Xhosa initiation ceremonies. During twenty-five minutes of slow movement, only a few seconds contained decisive action: figures broke out of the newspaper, opened and dropped umbrellas (used to ward away evil spirits), emitted short gusts of wordless high-pitched sounds, plucked hearts from their breasts and released them to the wind. Then one-by-one, the actors disappeared from whence they came. The effect was stunning.

Some complained Bailey was desecrating graves, while he claimed he was consecrating them. The naysayers won out and again Bailey was prohibited from performing at the locale of his choice. At the next performance, Bailey led his audience a quarter mile down the train tracks to an abandoned station platform, which he enhanced with a truck to create a second stage level. In this industrial, two-dimensional site, Bailey had instructed his actors to meditate on the frustration at being barred from expressing themselves. A third performance took place at the 1820 Settler's Monument, a building which dominates the Grahamstown landscape and serves as festival headquarters. People line the staircases to see performance teasers which take place in this central open space every evening, but given Bailey's sensitivity to space, the performance of Heartstopping at the Monument was more than just a publicity act.

Other productions along with Ipi Zombi addressed the prevalent belief in witchcraft. People's Justice, and the Market Theatre Laboratory's workshopped production, Salt, also explored the intricate web of belief and violence engendered by witchcraft. However, viewpoints of the supernatural shifted from one production to the next. In Ipi Zombi, witchcraft is valorized as a form of power; in Salt, witchcraft is [End Page 80] not denounced while the killing of those accused of witchcraft is; and in People's Justice, witchcraft is directly condemned as superstition responsible for a cycle of accusation that promotes a high level of violence in the community.

African belief systems were not the only religion under scrutiny at the festival. Harry Hofmeyr's critique of Afrikaner Calvinism made witchcraft look ordinary. Requiem depicted Henry in the Oedipal act of killing and eating his father, an upright Afrikaner Calvinist minister. Framed by psychotherapy sessions in a mental institution, the play presents flashbacks into his childhood, a classic sympathetic relationship with his mother and antagonistic relationship with his father, while a brief moment of bonding takes place through religion. Although well-received by the audience, the predictable and naturalistic script, acting and staging flattened the otherwise highly charged psychological tropes of the work.

If at last year's festival, emphasis lay on theatre dealing directly with the TRC (see Lewis, TJ 50:1, 1997), this year the gaze seems to have turned inward. First Stop Gauteng, a fringe production from Soweto directed by Willie Tshaka, also carried a theme of self-examination. Three spirits tell their life stories as they await judgment. Although they could be considered victims of the apartheid system, these spirits are punished for crimes of betrayal, not to the struggle, but to their parents, their lovers, and God. Only the female spirit escapes punishment for stealing since her status as a rape victim complicates her case. Another play inspired by the TRC was Not with My Gun by Aubrey Sekhabi, the winner of the 1998 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Drama. When a white man is caught stealing the wedding suits from a black man's house while he and his friends reminisce in the next room, one friend holds off the other three to give the thief a chance to explain himself. This gesture provides an alternative TRC for crimes not covered by the Commission, such as the economic deprivation of South African blacks. The three friends grow impatient and reduce the towering white man to a cowering ball in a style all too reminiscent of police interrogations. The violence gets out of hand, however, as a gun accidentally kills friend instead of foe. Injecting elements of township song and dance into an otherwise naturalistic domestic drama, a standard feature of local drama, Sekhabi's play gripped the audience with its slow-boiling intensity. [End Page 81]

From this year's festival, it seems clear that no one is under the illusion that the "new" South Africa has yet arrived. The student drama production, Past Imperfect, scripted by Greig Coetzee, put it quite vividly. A BMW filled with whites and a kombi taxi filled with blacks simultaneously arrive at an obstacle in the road--a huge, imaginary mound of shit. A series of short vignettes puts the onus on individuals to examine their own biases in everyday interactions. Both groups eventually agree to make like dung beetles and carry the shit off the road handful by handful. As each scoops up a chunk and begins to walk upstage, they suddenly turn around and throw it at the audience exclaiming in unison, "it's your shit too"!

Stephanie Marlin-Curiel
New York University

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