Cape Town - After a year of exploring the weird, wonderful and innovative, here are five must-try activities for you to experience in 2016.
Watch a riel dance
A wrong turn meant that my photographer and I arrived stressed and two hours late for a private sunset riel dance performance by Die Nuwe Graskoue Trappers at Bushman’s Kloof.
But all delays and difficulties vanished once the accordion struck and the dancers appeared in a flurry of dust.
Later, under a star peppered sky, Floris Smith, Bushman’s Kloof’s Executive Chef and manager of Die Nuwe Graskoue Trappers related how he had nurtured the dancers from reticent rural children to dazzling performers poised on the brink of the biggest event of their lives – travelling to Los Angeles to compete in the World Championships of Performing Arts WOCPA.
The next day we visited the dancers at their homes in the surrounding Moravian community. Although unemployment is high, and drug and alcohol abuse rife, these people enjoy a crime free idyllic life with a communal garden and church at the centre of each village. Life moves at the pace of a Cape cart, still the preferred mode of transport.
What would these young, impressionable adults make of the fast paced glitz of Los Angeles, I wondered?
This story has a wonderful ending as Die Nuwe Graskoue Trappers won gold at WOPCA.
l Bushman’s Kloof 021 437 9278
Discover Opera
Writers are notoriously voyeuristic. I’ll admit to being nosey for the sake of my art. This year my favourite eavesdropping activity was when I got the chance to go backstage and watch an opera rehearsal.
All art is a kind of magic making but creating the illusion on stage requires painstaking decisions about every moment of the performance. Being privy to that process deepens my appreciation of the final result.
This year I sat in on the rehearsal of Four:30 and watched the cast rehearse for Bessie: The Blue-Eyed Xhosa.
These home-grown operas were innovative on many levels: the four performances were brief – 30 minutes long, and they told African stories created by local writers and composers.
The audience surrounded a circular stage, giving an intimate and immersive experience.
Cape Town is blessed with a dynamic opera company that is willing to do risky, exciting work.
2016 is the year to discover opera, Cape Town’s most glamorous night out. Take advantage of a season ticket that gives you all six performances for R1250.
Aquaponics
Acclaimed photographer Fiona McPherson traded glamour for gardening and fashion for food to spearhead the aquaponics movement in South Africa.
Aquaponics grows vegetables watered from a fertiliser rich fish tank. I was a bit concerned – would the tomatoes taste of hake?
Gardening the aquaponics' way is a sheer pleasure. Plants are placed into hip level trays of gravel. There’s no backbreaking digging and no soil under the nails. Manicures intact! And the tomatoes were the ripest most succulent I had ever tasted – not a trace of hake.
Every crisis brings an opportunity and with severe drought encroaching, there has never been a better time for South Africa to explore this easy, efficient and sustainable method of food production that uses only two percent of the water used in commercial farming
I’m convinced that aquaponics is the farming of the future.
l Fiona McPherson 083 6010 637
Snorkel with Seals
I’ve got a problem with shark cage diving.
It seems undignified for the shark and I suspect that there is a link between chumming, which attracts the shark to the cage, and the increase in shark attacks.
And yet I long for close encounters with wild animals.
Nothing can beat seal snorkelling. An 8 meter rubber duck drops a bunch of wetsuit wearing tourists from every corner of the globe amidst 1,000 odd seals that are crammed onto the rocky outcrop of Duiker Island
Cape Fur seals, (Arctocephalus pusillus) are endemic to islands around the southern African coast and are found nowhere else in the world. The young seal pups are playful and inquisitive. They dart, dive and come nose to nose with your mask.
The water is a snappy ten degrees. The 5mm fleece lined wet suit offers miraculous protection, but the cold surrounds like a kind of menace, quietly oozing into your bones.
This is no toe-dipping, dabbling kind of an outing, but a full wilderness encounter with fifty minutes spent in the water. Where else can you meet nature on its own terms, not inside a cage or in a car?
l Contact [email protected]
Go to a silent disco
When images of headphone clad revellers starting appearing on the web announcing a new trend- silent discos – I thought this would be another short lived, silly fad. Socialising wearing a pair of isolating headphones seems yet another symptom of our cell-phone staring, solipsistic tendencies.
When a venue in St. James started hosting Silent Discos I decided to give it a try.
The moment I put on my headphones I was a teenager once again, bedroom door closed and dancing out my adolescent demons.
Wearing headphones has the strange effect, creating an illusion of privacy. Several Dj’s stream music to different channels and dancers choose which channel to listen to.
So on the dance floor you will have people thrashing around to heavy rock, doing funky eighties disco moves and or waving about like seaweed to trance music. This makes Silent Discos fun for the dancers, who can choose their groove, and equally entertaining for those watching.
Maybe Nietzsche was at a Silent Disco when he penned his famous quote: “and those who were seen dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music.”
But, no matter how strange Silent Dancers might look, Silent Discos are the most civilised way to party.
As you party into the night, a few feet away, neighbours sleep undisturbed.
l Octopus Garden 021 788 5646
Cape Times