The arts are essential too
Against the background of the devastating news that her latest production has been postponed to next year, director and theatre maker Sylvaine Strike insists humanity’s craving for collective experience will ensure that theatre survives.
“We are an essential service to the soul,” says award-winning Johannesburg-based theatre director Sylvaine Strike. “Theatre is indispensable to the soul, but we live in a country where – in the grand scheme of things – the arts are not valued, artists are not valued, and where this essential service we offer is hardly ever acknowledged.”
Strike, who was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French ministry of culture in 2019, says there is something “insanely disjointed” about how the performing arts have been targeted, ignored and dealt a devastating blow during the pandemic.
“The imposition on theatres is mental and completely disproportionate … as if there’s some sort of awful punitive measure being taken against us.”
We were talking during her lunch break between rehearsals at UCT’s Baxter Theatre, where she had been rehearsing a show that lockdown restrictions dictated would play to a half-empty auditorium, before a Covid scare at the theatre delayed its opening, and then saw its postponement until January 2022.
It was the first play she had directed since lockdown began in March last year, and while she said she was grateful for the privilege, her voice suggested tremendous sadness because of the manner in which the ban on gatherings had effectively decimated an already fragile theatre industry.
Although a half-full theatre was better than no theatre at all, it remained “incredibly hard in terms of ticket sales that need to sustain technicians, cleaners, ushers … never mind actors’ salaries, never mind all the other people who make theatre happen”.
She said there was something inherently wrong with a country that refused to see the value that theatre brings to people: “It’s indicative of a sick country that artists are made to feel like they don’t matter.”
The show Strike was directing for the Baxter was Kiss of the Spider Woman. She said that, as the theatre sector had started to open up, many industry people were living vicariously through it, keen to see it reignite theatre-going, administering to humanity’s inherent need for collective experience.
The Baxter, in fact, was due to mount two important productions this month – the other (also postponed) was Lara Foot’s Life & Times of Michael K, a collaboration with Handspring Puppet Theatre adapted from JM Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel.
The aim was for these two shows “to give hope to the industry, be forerunners that start to rebuild confidence in the sector,” Strike said. “We’ve been in a state of deprivation for so long.”
Kiss of the Spider Woman, based on Argentine writer Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel, was first adapted for the stage in the 1980s and then as a film starring William Hurt and the late Raul Julia. It is set in a prison where two seemingly very different men are confined. What they – one an effete homosexual, the other a revolutionary – discover, is their shared humanity. It’s a tender, loving glimpse into our human compulsion to connect.
The choice to do a play set in a prison had nothing to do with humanity’s recent experience of lockdowns and quarantines, Strike said, even if it did seem uncannily apt. Its theme of looking for connection during prolonged confinement certainly strikes a chord with our present moment, however.
Somewhat prophetically, Strike said that it had been an ongoing concern whether or not the show would in fact go on. “With talk of the Third Wave, we are wondering if we’ll rehearse till the end, and if we do open, if we’ll be closed before the end of our run.”
Strike said it had been emotional returning to the rehearsal room.
It was “enormous for me,” she said. “Enormous, I sense, for the actors as well. I’m acutely aware that we’re all in quite a fragile state. So much hangs in the balance.”
Strike said she was also acutely aware of the effect that the lack of performance opportunities over the past year-and-a-bit had had on her actors. The prolonged periods of isolation and disconnection had seeped into their DNA.
“Something that’s quintessential to a performer’s survival and mental health is being visible,” she said. There’s a need to be seen, to have an audience to connect with.
“For performers, a lack of work equals a lack of visibility, which equals a kind of death.
While we all have private lives, of course, professionally we only exist because others can see us – being seen is by definition what we do.”
Strike said she believed that the pandemic had made it startlingly evident that we live in a country where performers are not seen. “Or where what we do is seen as a luxury.” This meant that their essential role in tending to the soul had been overlooked, negated.
Artists, she said, have been made to feel “dispensable”. To some extent, this has been a result of the easy availability of quick-fix experiences. When we want a story, we just flick to Netflix, or turn on the radio. Children, instead of being taught to value theatre, have been allowed to become dependent on their devices for stimulation: “Their passivity, as a consequence, is devastating.”
The theatre Strike has always set out to create is anything but passive. Her goal is total engagement, to grip the audience in a moment of sustained ritual so that they are transformed. A kind of sacred alchemy is achieved “by altering an audience’s mood, their emotive space, their endorphins”.
And, she said, this alchemy is affected by the connection that happens between the audience and the actors who become, effectively, shamanic instruments of healing.
Unlike passively watching Netflix, “which demands little imagination because the story has been cut and edited for you,” a theatre audience must actively “participate in the suspension of disbelief”.
In this way, the audience becomes part of something transcendental. It’s then, Strike believes, that collective healing can happen.
It’s in that “suspended, non-binary, elevated space” she sets out to create on stage that the performance becomes a ritual that can shift consciousness.
To achieve that shift in consciousness,
Strike and her actors rehearsed for four weeks.
The process involved discovering not only the timeless essence of the text, but distilling the energies and emotions of the actors’ realworld experiences so that those, too, became concentrated in the two characters – Valentin and Molina
– who have been in prison for four years, confined together and effectively forced to connect. In this way, what audiences would experience is a microcosm of life that exists in a liminal space.
Getting to that space was complicated by the process of rehearsing during a pandemic, though.
“Touch and connection are normally taken totally for granted,” Strike said. “As actors, we sweat on each other, spit on each other… That is the nature of performance. But, during this particular process, we began with masks on, and then started taking them off. And then there’s, ‘May I touch you? May I do this, may I do that?’ There’s been a very different energy, one that’s not necessarily wanted. But it has crept into our DNA, has crept into our fear of making someone else sick.”
There is a moment of intimacy in the show that’s quite pivotal to the narrative and that requires physical closeness between the actors, Strike explained. “But, of course, for the first half of the process we weren’t able to rehearse that moment because of Covid protocols, because we hadn’t been in the same room together for 14 days.”
And so, unavoidably, that tentativeness with which human connection happens nowadays became woven into the fabric of the
performance. And Strike said it would become part of the meaning of the ritual, something that audiences would undoubtedly have responded to, felt a familiarity with.
That need to connect with others is also at the heart of Strike’s directing process, and so she was aware of needing to modify how she worked. “Usually
I’m incredibly hands-on with my actors. It’s been really hard for me having to hold back. I was the one catching an aeroplane to come down to
Cape Town, and there’s a worry I might expose them.”
She said that part of the great joy of working with actors was experiencing proximity with them, of being part of their process of transformation. It’s a form of alchemy that Strike gets to experience, but something which “if there’s a pandemic,” she can’t.
She described the absence of this proximity to actors as something akin to being denied access to loved ones, being unable to connect with a lover or with one’s children.
Strike said she was surprised by “how dark things could get, how dark things could feel” when she was unable to do what she loved, unable to experience that alchemy with actors and audiences.
On a practical level, for the sake of survival, the pandemic saw her stepping into her performing shoes, something she hadn’t done in a long time. “What surprised me about myself is how my survival instincts kicked in. I auditioned for Budget Insurance commercials. I started doing things that I’ve had the privilege of not needing to do because my career in theatre is established enough that I’ve been able to survive off making three plays a year.
“But I really didn’t care if people saw me in an insurance commercial, because doing that advert meant I could put my kids through school. That surprised me about myself.”
Strike said while she had been personally humbled by the economic realities wrought by the pandemic, she was also deeply aware of its devastating impact on the wider theatre community.
“We tend to think of actors as these people who are eternally able to fend for themselves – as if they don’t have families and children to put through school, feed and clothe. We don’t seem to form part of normal society, and yet we have the same bills and taxes.
“I know many people who are simply not coping – from putting food on the table to paying medical bills and coping with mental health issues – because their survival relies on getting as many singing gigs as possible. Or getting an acting contract. Or going from one musical to the next. That’s how they pay their rent. From a very basic perspective, their survival is reliant on having audiences.
“I think that this pandemic has activated the arts sector, and revealed the flaws of who is leading us – who the minister overseeing the arts is. What’s evident is that there is absolutely no knowledge of what we do, no knowledge of how freelancers survive.
“The fact that we live from job to job is inconceivable to most people, but it is how we’ve done it for hundreds of years. The nature of the live performer is that we do gigs. But we have a government that doesn’t understand, value or revere our profession.”
And yet Strike said she believed firmly in her heart that theatre would not die. “Theatre will survive. It has survived wars, it’s survived other pandemics. There is no chance of it not surviving.”
She says it is the artists – those performers who, in order to exist, need to be seen – who will ensure it survives. Because they must. Because it is in their blood, part of their DNA.
“And so we will make it work. Whether it’s performing in a flipping parking lot, or we do it in a park or under a tree, or in an outdoor arena like it used to be in ancient Greece… We will make it work, because the human need for storytelling will endure.”
The Baxter Theatre announced on 8 June that
performances of Kiss of the Spider Woman had been postponed to January 2022 after two crew members at the theatre tested positive for Covid-19 just before the premiere.