Midnight shows another face of arts fest city
Vendors on a shoestring lie low to dodge cops, while free-roaming donkeys are a common sight on the streets
THERE are three pictures that photographers covering the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown want.
First, like all first-time Festinos, they are fascinated by the kids with the white-painted faces standing on corners to perform for their money.
Second, they want to take pictures of movement, preferably dance – just do not ask for a boring, static shot.
Then, the sunset. At some point there will be squealing of tyres as we race to the top of the hill to get a perfect shot of a golden sky. Except this year.
This year the weather was not only unseasonably mild, but the clouds simply did not conspire to tower majestically. Instead, photographer Nokuthula Mbatha and I were riding around, looking for donkeys.
It amused the Tonight Entertainment Editor no end, but photographer Thuli (she prefers her nickname) and I were on a mission to find the unsupervised donkeys I see year after year, wandering around Grahamstown late at night or early in the morning.
We did find them late one night, and after trailing them for a while, Thuli asked what else happened around Grahamstown after dark.
I was confident there would be raucous partying at the Rat and Parrot pub and surely some sort of outside performances.
Instead, we saw the other side of Grahamstown – the vendors who cannot afford accommodation and who surreptitiously prepare food for themselves when the municipal cops aren’t watching.
People who have to take care of everyday needs, like having clean clothes and finding a safe place to sleep, all done on a shoestring budget while trying to make a buck and not spend it.
Up at Rhodes University’s Drostdy Arch I got to talking to the guys selling art, shoes and bags and realised the reason they and their wares looked so familiar was because they sell from outside this newspaper group’s offices in Cape Town.
“This isn’t working – walk that way,” Thuli orders, immortalising my Docs in the Independent Newspapers archives.
Riding past the Rhodes Box, we spot a figure on the roof and realise there are statues up there.
They are part of Taryn King’s exhibition, Sentinels.
Few people look up, and even fewer realise that the statues, fibreglass casts made from moulds of the artist’s body, have their eyes firmly closed. These watchers aren’t watch- ing anything.
As Thuli tries to get the perfect shot of a vendor selling boerewors rolls outside a popular bar on New Street, I ask the woman what she does when it isn’t festival time. She would like to do this, sell food, but she doesn’t know how to go about starting a business or where to find someone who will do this for her.
We move on to the market space around the Cathedral, but we don’t spot anyone making a fire. For that we have to go back to the guys at the Drostdy Arch on another night.
We find a woman selling Senegalese food at the market and she is amused that we want a picture of her dishing it out – but her customers persuade her to pretend. The next guy got a large amount of rice with his chicken.
When Thuli takes a picture of the shadow cast by a host of bags hanging on the side of a stall, an old man asks her what she is doing, crouching on the ground.
And once she explains, she persuades him to walk down the aisle so she can get movement in the shot – and one of the souls who go unseen at the fest is suddenly immortalised in the media.