A View From The Top

Published Oct 3, 2014

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LARA DE MATOS

TONIGHT EDITOR

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@Lara_de_Matos

It’s a land mass smaller than North West province (and half of which, technically, doesn’t even fall within its own borders), yet it has produced an impressively long list of successful figures in the arts, ranging from Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, WB Yeats and CS Lewis to Richard Harris, Bob Geldof, The Cranberries, Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Sinead O’Connor and, who could forget, the awesome foursome long touted as the greatest rock band in the world, U2.

Creativity clearly flows fast and furious in the blood of our Irish brethren (leading you to wonder if there’s more to their national black beer than barley alone), which is why a recent glimpse into their capital city’s live performance scene proved rather, well, disappointing.

Bellies full with good ol’ Irish grub and tickets in hand, our multinational media contingent was all set to bask in the brilliance of Dublin’s Fringe Festival (or a glimpse of it, at any rate), trumpeted as “an amazingly eclectic mix of live entertainment across theatre, comedy, music, spectacle and street performance”.

The festival itself (which ran for just over two weeks) may very well have been all that and more. The closing night – comprising a series of vignettes of the best of the fest – however, was not.

Between the burlesque dancer supposedly making a pro-feminist statement by taking her clothes off (yes, I, too, am still confused); the male tap dancer who stripped down to a thong and proceeded to dance with his tassels-clad butt cheeks turned to the audience (Dubliners clearly don’t suffer from any sense of false modesty); the spoken word ensembles who apparently felt their contrived “free to be me” rhymes would be better understood if they – yes, more nudity – bared their chests; comedians whose one-liners did little to rouse me from my slumber (perhaps their localised jokes were simply lost on us foreign folk) and an all-female band fronted by a waif of a twenty-something whose insipid self-penned I Am What I Am type song (yup, yet more of the “express yourself” schmaltz) literally had me and a Welsh colleague slinking in our seats out of sheer embarrassment on their behalf, the proverbial pickings were anorexically thin. And yet, I found myself in awe.

Not of the performers (obviously!), but of the audience. In all my worldly travels across many a country and continent, never had I witnessed such unabated enthusiasm for, and support of, the performing arts. Forget the fact that what was on offer was, at best, comparable to a high school production.

To the Irish spectators, that those actors/acrobats/singers/dancers/ comedians/poets were brave enough to step up on to that stage and give it a go, was reason enough to celebrate their efforts. (Though admittedly, at one point I did speculate if they were a “rent a crowd” of the friends and family variety, or, if perhaps it was the pints of Guinness endlessly flowing down their throats that made them so amenable.)

I was simultaneously struck by the thought that even the most inexperienced among our home-grown talent could easily run circles around their supposedly professional Irish fellows. And yet, for the most part, we remain so critical of our South African artists and seldom step out to support our own, as evidenced by the distinctly dwindling number of “bums on seats” in theatres across the nation.

The high cost of theatre tickets and the risk of being a victim of crime while out in the evening have been suggested as possible causes. (Threadbare excuses: people still splash out on booze or party into the wee hours at the latest night spot.)

Perhaps it’s political fatigue that keeps our audiences away. With our daily lives already so saturated with the current civic state of affairs, having to contend with dedicating your leisure hours to yet another production about apartheid/the struggle is hardly an enticing idea.

Be that as it may, we would do well to remember that the performing arts have been in existence since cavemen first did their “oogh oogh” dance around the fire and Euripides and his Greek kin penned their centuries-transcending tragedies. That says something about its importance in human society… as a form of expression, of social commentary, of education, as the narrator of history, of simple entertainment and – something we South Africans are in sore need of – as a means to bring people together.

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