The Mid-year presentations for this year’s Gipca Creative Arts Fellowships will be held on Sunday at 4pm.
This year’s Fellows who will present their works in progress are Justin Krawitz, Lance Herman, Ruth Levin-Vorster, Sanjin Muftic and Simon Gush.
The fellowship is similar to the idea of a post-doctorate and its purpose is to make funding available to talented individuals to do creative research and work on a year-long project within the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (Gipca). The fellowship is also intended to encourage the growth of registrations at the PhD level in the creative arts at UCT.
“This mid-year presentation allows us to get a substantial taste of the work of these excellent and provocative Fellows, but most especially, since they will be presented all at once, this rich experience will foreground the range of innovation and the potential for interdisciplinary work that Gipca seeks to make space for,” commented Jay Pather, director of Gipca.
l Award-winning pianist Krawitz explores piano music of the Cape in CapeTone. His study will culminate in a lecture-recital focusing on Arnold van Wyk’s Tristia and Hendrik Hofmeyr’s new Piano Sonata.
For his mid-year presentation he will talk about his experience working with composer Karel Husa, the Pulitzer prize-winning Czech-American composer who celebrates his 90th birthday this year.
“In his honour, I will play the first movement of his Piano Sonata No 1, which I recorded last year for Czech Radio,” said Krawitz, who recently returned to Cape Town from the US, where he was an associate lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
l Eliezer is a performance persona through which Herman is producing a body of writing, music and drawings during his term with Gipca. While the project explores questions around interdisciplinary art practice, it also interrogates how an alter-ego can inform the artist’s own sense of self.
Herman’s review will consist of a reconstruction of the artist’s studio (designed and built by fourth-year Michaelis School of Fine Art student Rodan Kane Hart), as well as a display of several works completed thus far.
These include two music albums (Hall of Dreams and Knots), a book of aphoristic writings and drawings (My Bedroom Wall), and a manuscript of his forthcoming novel, Middelburg.
Herman’s Eliezer will open on Thursday at 6pm at Michaelis Galleries.
Herman – vocalist for a band called Ginsburg and Herman – holds a master’s degree in English literature and has an extensive background as a performing musician.
l For her fellowship, Levin-Vorster will combine the fields of medicine, dance and film. She has conceived and will direct and choreograph a series of screen dance films entitled Do No Harm.
Levin-Vorster is an inter-disciplinary artist working as a theatre director, choreographer, writer, teacher and performance artist.
For her mid-year presentation she will share some of the content of her films and expand on her research process to date. This will include screenings of inter-national screen dance works that have served to draw her to this medium.
l Sampling is widely acknow-ledged as the process of using part of a previously recorded material as an instrument in a new recording.
For his fellowship, Muftic investigates whether it is possible to repeat the process for a live performance – taking sections of previously performed material and restaging these as components of a new performance.
After Muftic completed an undergraduate degree in Canada, splitting focus between theatre and computer science, he came to UCT and mastered a postgraduate degree and has now started using multimedia in his productions.
His mid-year presentation will take the shape of a museum exhibit that chronicles his understanding of sampling.
The event is divided into several performance exhibitions, each one dealing with a different aspect of the process and including professional Cape Town performers and UCT performance students.
l Gush’s work – in collaboration with James Cairns – is a production of a video under the concept of speculative montage.
Gush graduated from Wits with a fine arts degree in 2003, completed a two-year residency at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, in 2008 and frequently collaborates with other local producers.
Faith is a triptych of short films – Positions of Vacancy, Plainsong and Distance – which look at the status of Cosatu, examining the increasingly divided opinion within Cosatu regarding their ideology.
Gush and Cairns will present a public reading of the scripts.
This year’s Creative Arts Fellowships mid-year presentations will be held on Sunday at 4pm on the Hiddingh Campus in association with Michaelis Galleries. The presentations are free and open to the public.