The other side of the Windybrow: a place of visionaries restoring an almost lost art
Iarrived at the Windybrow Arts Centre in a state of mild trepidation. This was not because, as people sometimes say, it is in a dodgy neighbourhood. The precinct, on the border of Hillbrow and Doornfontein, is like much of Johannesburg: in a state somewhere between repair and disrepair, with opportunity and poverty, beauty and grime not so much coexisting as mutually informing each other.
On any given day, the people of Jozi are doing what people do – heading to work, coming home, shopping, doing chores and resting. All this should go without saying, but the pseudo anthropological way in which visitors talk and write about downtown Joburg can be so exoticising, so painfully condescending, so faux glamourising, it somehow seems necessary to affirm (misappropriating the title of Athol Fugard’s play) that people are living there.
No, my nervousness upon arrival at the Windybrow was based purely on my own inadequacies. For one thing, local arts writers worth their salt should know a bit about the three decades-long history of the theatre and arts centre that has occupied this space — should, at least, have seen a show or listened to a poetry jam there. But this was my first visit, and the first time I would learn anything about the Windybrow beyond its name.
There was another reason for my sheepishness. I am quietly in awe of the doers: the people who make things happen, who go beyond talking and writing, who dispense with posturing and postulating, and who just muck in and get it done. For the rejuvenation of the Windybrow Arts Centre, the doers are also visionaries whose collective creativity extends from the performing arts to architecture.
The story of the Windybrow goes something like this: in 1896, mining engineer and would-be Randlord Theodore Reunert built a family mansion in mock Tudor style. Within a few years, it had been turned into temporary lodgings for British officers in the war of 1899-1902; the Reunerts would later sell it off and it would serve as a boarding home and nursing college residence.
In the late 1980s, the statefunded Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal built a theatre alongside the house. The fate of the Windybrow post-apartheid has veered from thriving arts hub to victim of a botched capital works programme that rendered both house and theatre unfit for public use.
Luckily, after the Market Theatre Foundation took over management of the Windybrow in 2014, renovation proceeded apace. The house was reopened in 2017 – restored, one is tempted to say, to its former glory. However, the great joy of this new start for the Windybrow is that it represents exactly the opposite of what it did 120 years ago: inclusion, not exclusion; art for all as opposed to wealth for some.
The Windybrow project received funding from the Department of Arts and Culture and has been co-managed by arts companies The Coloured
Cube and Sticky Situations. It is a fine example of how publicprivate partnerships can work. And with the support of organisations such as Business and Arts SA, the Windybrow is again a place to meet and create.
It was on March 20, the World Day of Theatre for Children and Young People – an initiative of ASSITEJ, the international youth theatre association led by SA’s Yvette Hardie – that I visited the Windybrow to see Ngale kweNdlu: The Other Side of the House, a site-specific work that takes audiences through and around the building.
Working with directors Alex Halligey and Tamara Guhrs, a cast of young actors from the Market Theatre Foundation’s new company have reimagined a handful of characters associated with the house to revivify its history.
Groups of schoolchildren were taking turns following the history of Windybrow Theatre has all the elements of drama, twists and turns that form part of a new work being staged. dramatic tour and participating in performance workshops. The buzz of angle-grinders emanated from the construction site inside the theatre next door. Finally, I was able to set aside my own insecurities. Doers and writers, actors and audiences, Joburgers and out-of-towners, young and old: the Windybrow welcomes all.