Nothing but the best on the boards

Published Mar 17, 2015

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The Klein Karoo National Arts Festival has cobbled together a bumper programme this year. Diane de Beer offers the lowdown.

THEATRE

Young turk, Wessel Pretorius, who has been awarded an Afrikaans Onbeperk prize for a Young Voice, debuts Al Julle Volke. In it he stars with Greta Pietersen (who played his wife in the recent Wie’s Bang Vir Virginia Wolf?) and JP Rossouw. Directing in tandem with Nico Scheepers, who is also doing the choreorgaphy, the text grapples with the Afrikaners’ search for a leader but also explores belief, friendship, being a man and different definitions of love and honour.

• Jaco Bouwer and Tertius Kapp again come together with Kapp’s translation of a Bernard-Marie Koltès text, Buite Blaf Die Honde Swart. It tells of three Europeans who find themselves on a desolate construction site somewhere in Africa. Hans (Dawid Minnaar) is the weary boss who passes the time with booze and cards, and he knows that Kallie (Albert Pretorius) has hidden the body of a black worker who died under suspicious circumstances. To muddy the waters, Liliana (Tinarie van Wyk Loots) his fiancée, has just arrived. When the dead man’s brother comes around to demand his body, the sparks start flying.

• Site-specific work in the Karoo has grown in strength because of the quality and the environment. In Dirk Ligter, a Tankwa Karoo story written by Albert Maritz and directed by Lara Bye, the legendary exploits of the much-feared or loved (depending on where you were standing) Ligter are explored. It is said that farmers only started sleeping peacefully after his death, but also that the night skies had grown a new star – one that smiles.

• Nicola Hanekom, queen of site-specific, moves into the theatre with In Glas starring Stian Bam, Tinarie van Wyk Loots, Paul du Toit, Bronwyn van Graan and Sive Gubanxa. As writer and director, she tells the story of suburbia where moms go jogging with their babies in prams, while Saturdays are overwhelmingly about cutting lawns and catching rugby, but everything isn’t quite what it seems. Some babies aren’t simply flown in, some are made of glass.

• Another Saartjie Botha translation, Bertold Brecht’s Moeder Moed en Haar Kinders starring Aletta Bezuidenhout, Deon Lotz, André Roothman, Nicole Holm, Juliana Venter, Jacques Theron, Cintaine Schutte, Milan Struwig and Gideon Lombard, directed by Jerry Mofokeng, investigates if the playwright’s disection of Nazi war is still as relevant today as it was more than a half-a-century ago. It seems to grow in strength as the wars seem to grow in intensity.

• Santa Gamka is a text based on Eben Venter’s shocking book about a brown rent boy starring Marlo Minnaar and directed by Jaco Bouwer. It is all these dynamics that turns this into something unusual. Lucky Maraisa is a rent boy who has been given some chances because he made them. Just like his name, he believes, until he is stuck in a pottery kiln and relives his short life.

• Siener in die Suburbs is given new life with a coloured cast starring Shaleen Surtie Richards, Christo Davids, Brendon Daniels, Ivan Abrahams, Chrystal-Donna Roberts, Dann-Jacques Mouton and Andrea Franksen. Directed by Heinrich Reisenhofer and reworked by Oscar Petersen, it will give new meaning to this celebrated PG du Plessis drama which won many accolades for Marius Weyers and Sandra Prinsloo decades ago. It should do exactly that for this new generation.

• If you haven’t caught Phillip Dikotla’s Skierlik, don’t miss it. The young playwright/actor tells the story of this forgotten community who emerge from the cold only when some of their people have been shot in a white/black shooting. “But that’s not what interested me,” says this strong new voice. “Do we have to die before things start changing?” The play has won Fleur du Cap awards and the script was rewarded with the Thomas Pringle prize for playwrighting. This is someone to watch as he achieves great heights from the start of his career.

• UHM with Sive Gubanxa, Alex McCarthy, Jason Jacobs, Kathleen Stephens and Callum Tillbury, directed by Koleka Patuma, tells the story of a Xhosa woman who was raised in all ways English. She is working on a thesis about Victorian literature and meets up with Queen Victoria, Cecil John Rhodes and Sol Plaatje which leads to clashing cultures and conversations.

Some of the work that has travelled that should be checked out include Jaco Bouwer’s Na-Aap with De Klerk Oelofse, Christiaan Olwagen’s Die Seemeeu which gives the new generation’s interpretation of Chekov and Saartjie Botha’s adaptation of André P Brink’s Bidsprinkaan.

• The KKNK, April 3 to 12 in Oudtshoorn.

MUSIC

Music is always a living organism at the KKNK because there’s a passion to make music with musicians who might seem like odd combinations and are brought together; or solo performers expand their horizons and try things that might have been too difficult on another platform. Check some of these:

• Gloria Bosman, Anna Davel and Timothy Moloi, all smooth crooners, get together for Afrika in Afrikaans directed musically by Janine Neethling who will also receive a Kunste Onbeperk prize for cross-pollination in the way she brings different musical genres and artists together to place Afrikaans in a wider South African context – like right here. With text and direction by Davel, the music aims to bring Africa into the Afrikaans language, or the other way round.

• Bobby van Jaarsveld will sing along with Freshlyground’s Zolani Mahola joined by musicians Albert Frost and Francois van Coke in Al Lê Die Berge Nog So Blou. In a celebration of the blues, they will move between old classics and fresh sounds.

• Winand Gründling, who won two awards for his previous classical concert, will be spotlighting Bach in a show titled Bach Vandag in which he’ll explore the universal themes of his non-liturgical music and after 400 years, how new meanings still emerge. It’s a contemporary revisionist approach to Bach’s compositions.

• Magdalene Minnaar, one of the most refreshing young voices in opera today, will team with the Gugulethu Tenors in Bravo Opera to bring some of those classic favourites sung so often by the best-known tenors. But she’s sure to add a twist.

She will also present Nokturne with pianist Francois du Toit in which she sings beautiful night music. And she repeats the popular Aardklop presentation with Neethling and Schalk Joubert, Taal van My Hart. It’s stirring stuff.

• Luna Paige, the woman with the coffee-smooth voice, will gather her gang including marvellous musos like Gerald Clark, Schalk Joubert, Nick Turner and Frieda van der Heever for Die Ander Konsert and they combine six voices, two pianos, a clutch of guitars, a world-class bass guitarist as well as percussion which enhances the rhythm.

• Karnaval van die Diere will put Philip de Vos, who is a rhyme master par excellence, on stage to tell the tale with conductor Brandon Phillips, and pianists Sulayman Human and Roelof Temmingh with the Cape Philhamonic. With this kind of musical firepower, it will give voice to those carnaval animals!

• Is there anything to say about the combo titled Kurt (Darren) and Karen (Zoid) Op Klavier? It’s an odd mix, but that’s what makes it so intriguing. And even more so when the two sets of audience will sit down to listen.

ART

Art plays a significant role in Oudtshoorn with the choice of artists and art always a talking point.

This year’s festival artist is the challenging Berni Searle (pictured) who has titled her work Stygend (Rising). Her art is always hitched firmly to the South African landscape and post-colonial history. This one combines video projections of Black Smoke Rising, pointing to political protest in this country; Mute, which explores xenophobia attacks in 2008 and Alibama which looks at our oral traditions.

Animation also takes centre stage with As Die Vlooie Byt in La La Land with Nathani Lüneburg exploring loss and the way we deal with it in our subconscious. It’s both personal and collective and in this sense looks at xenophobia, the trauma of apartheid and the consequences for contemporary Afrikaners. Diek Grobler’s Filmverse, a poetry animation project in which artists were invited to make a short animation film on a specific poem, will also be screened throughout the festival.

Winner of last year’s L’Atelier award, Liberty Battson, presents Baie Belaglik (laughable) which exhibits funny statistics with colour and proportion as the main ingredients. Photographer Peter Magubane, who’s been at the last few KKNK festivals, is being honoured with a Kuns Onbeperk for lifetime achievement as well as showing a series titled Die Afrikaners: ’n Werk in Wording in which he covers everything from Karoo farmers to Sandra Prinsloo. The work is ongoing and will be happening during the festival which is a congregation of Afrikaners and fertile ground for this insightful photographer.

Concluding the art segment of the festival are a group of female sculpture artists including Hannelie Taute, Sikho Siyotula, Wilma Cruise, Nandipha Mntambo, Claudette Schrõder and Doreen Southwood with Prinses in die Veld who will be looking at the place of women in the local landscape.

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