Holding power to account
There’s got to be a word for that specific kind of grief, sings Lizzie Gaisford on the fourth track of her debut solo album Love the Land, which is a poem, almost a requiem, for nature, for ecosystems, and for things lost and things broken.… Read more
There were sergeants in the apartheid army who could bark out 30 or more words in an unbroken stream to create an extended insult involving bodily functions, body parts, bodily fluids, animals, familial relationships, and sex.… Read more
Hot from its run at the National Arts Festival (NAF) in Makhanda, Durban-based performer and comedian Ben Voss will keep asking his audiences if at 50, would anyone still want to watch him? … Read more
A play with sexual encounters as its premise is likely to read very differently today, then it did when first written in 1897.
Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde (originally Reigen in German) is made up of ten scenes, each one being a sexual encounter, but involving a character from the previous scene.… Read more
Rejecting her husband’s disparagement, Nora Helmer walks out the door, leaving him and two small children behind.
That was the final scene of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, first performed in Copenhagen in 1879. In A Doll’s House, Part 2, written in 2017 by American playwright Lucas Hnath, Nora returns 15 years later with a knock on the same door.… Read more
There were probably few, if any, people who, when they stood up to give The Ugly Noo Noo a standing ovation in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, thought it could be even more relevant in distant 2024.
After all, when Andrew Buckland wrote and performed it in 1988 it was, disguised beneath the surreal humour and superb physical comedy, an essentially political play.… Read more
By Ashraf Hendricks/GroundUp
The Khayelitsha Music Academy started in 2006 in a shack near the beach, with just one student receiving guitar lessons. Today the school has 19 students and teaches several instruments and music theory.… Read more
Othello is in essence a soap opera. It lacks the regicide, fratricide, witchery, and mysticism of many of his other works. What we do have, though, is uxoricide, horrifyingly common in South Africa. The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice,is also arguably racist in its stereotype of the black man easily manipulated by the Machivellian European, Iago, although there are counter-arguments.… Read more
Fiona Ramsay and Graham Hopkins are a racy duo. Phenomenal. Hitting 90 miles an hour around the turns in their repartee. The comebacks and self deprecations fast and furious, going off at tangents and on a camber in transparent bids to avoid the crash of self realisation.… Read more
The N1 is a long road, dry too, mostly. Grass faded blonde among the black rocks but still waving in the wind, even in the Karoo beneath the sun blasted mesas and the twisted ridges. A squint is burnt into the landscape by a merciless sun, becoming increasingly tortured the souther you go from Beaufort West.… Read more