What a virtual National Arts Festival looks like
• The Makhanda showpiece, online this year, will have much in common with the events of previous years
Makhanda, city of sinners and saints, town of learning and poverty, place of no water, Oxford on the veld, site of bloodshed, formerly Grahamstown, home of the settlers and the soldiers, located on the land of Ndlambe and Ngqika and Nxele and Ntsikana, conspiracy of spires and shacks, preserver of the faultlines of frontier country, landscape aflame with aloes.
Makhanda, Eastern Cape, SA. Hub of the arts. Site of pilgrimage for hopeful artists and aficionados alike. Home of the annual National Arts Festival.
If you’ve been there, on a frigid June or July day, sipping hot soup as you wait in a queue outside an old building serving as a makeshift theatre, people gossiping, trading notes about shows; if you’ve found yourself drinking your fourth coffee before noon, browsing the fare on the Village Green as you regret your 3am bedtime, then declaring with Edith Piaf, Non, je ne regrette rien — if you’ve been there, you know.
So much of the National Arts Festival experience is bound up in accumulating fragments of sense data. The vivid, mundane, glorious, infuriating, energising, disappointing, sublime, boring moments that make it all so enriching seem to depend less on the art and more on simply being immersed in the physical space of Makhanda.
So what does it mean for the festival to be virtual in 2020?
It probably means a greater focus on the artists and their work. It definitely means wider access: “Find Amazing Everywhere”, in the words of this year’s tagline. With day passes selling for R80 and ondemand tickets for Fringe shows starting at R25, this is a very affordable festival. And potentially, with a wider consumer base and limited overhead costs, it means decent revenue for artists.
Some things stay the same. The programme is diverse, so you’re likely to be overwhelmed by choice. But the curated daily content makes things more manageable, and Fringe shows and other events can be viewed until July 16. You can shop at the virtual Village Green. There’s also plenty for free, on the visual arts programme in particular.
I’m confident that my engagement with the festival in 2020 will have lots in common with 2019 and previous years.
There will be jazz. There will be comedy. I’ll try to consume both of these late at night for the sake of continuity. I’ll look out for familiar names producing theatre and music I know I’ll love; I’ll also make sure I discover the work of artists I’ve never heard of. For each show, I’ll darken the room and immerse myself in a new creative universe. Then I’ll stumble, blinking, into grim, wonderful, weird reality. I’ll tune into news headlines and wonder which is the real world and which the imagined one.
Oh, and I’ll watch dance, because it is an art form that baffles me — in the best possible way. I can intellectualise my way through any bizarre play, make sense of the most conceptual painting or performance, sit earnestly and listen to discordant songs. But dance, though I have tried to learn its language and to discern its codes, remains perplexing.
I’ll study Mamela Nyamza as she excoriates “the sordid underbelly of arts and culture institutions” in Pest Control.I’ll get my Butoh on in Oupa Sibeko and Nicola Pilkington’s collaboration The Rebirth of Iqhawe.I’ll sit with Themba Mbuli and Billy Langa’s The Boat, which is inspired by migrants. I’ll embrace the “nonnarrative ballet” of Hannah Ma’s Sylphides-humans-fishes-birds.
Earlier this week, in anticipation of the pleasing bemusement of dance, I watched Vincent Mantsoe’s Cut. This work is not on the festival programme but is running concurrently (there is art “elsewhere”, after all, and when it’s all online you don’t have to choose). Watching Cut gave me that quiet thrill of confusion I’ve enjoyed in Makhanda over the years.
Mantsoe’s choreography — part mime, part acting, part trance dance — is an emotive response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The human animal is displayed in all its anxious vulnerability, all its stubborn perseverance. Perhaps a state of uncertainty is the most appropriate response a work of art can invoke at this time of universal confusion.
The National Arts Festival runs until July 5 nationalartsfestival.co.za
Cut is available to watch on YouTube.