SA artists on winning streak at international fests
SOUTH African artists, like their sporting counterparts, have been on a winning streak in the international arena recently.
This past week, three South African productions were staged at the Amsterdam Fringe in Netherlands.
The productions were selected by the Amsterdam Fringe after they won the coveted Standard Bank Ovation Award at the National Arts Festival in July. Hol, performed by Nicola Hanekom and directed by Fred Abrahamse; The Epicene Butcher, created by Jemma Kahn; and the musical duo Nibs van der Spuy and Guy Buttery won a fine place in the hearts of Dutch audiences.
The Epicene Butcher won the Amsterdam Fringe Festival’s two biggest awards, the reviewers choice for best production and the jury’s best international production prize.
This success follows hot on the heels of Mies Julie, a Baxter Theatre and National Arts Festival co-production which also won all the major awards at the recent Edinburgh Festival.
South Africa’s outstanding achievement in Amsterdam is even more significant because it coincides with the 25th anniversary of the historic Culture in Another South Africa festival that was hosted there in 1987.
The Culture in Another South Africa Festival was presented as an anti-apartheid initiative featuring Barbara Masekela, Nadine Gordimer, William Kentridge, Peter Ngwenya, the African Jazz Pioneers and the late John Matshikiza.
The event coincided with the 75th anniversary of the ANC.
This month when the South African artists scooped such high accolades in Amsterdam, their participation coincided with a time in South Africa’s history when the ANC is currently celebrating its centenary.
The Dutch have a long history of supporting South African arts and culture, particularly with the way in which the arts are engaged to advance democratic values in South Africa.
The Culture in Another South Africa came five years after two earlier historic cultural festivals, namely Culture and Resistance, organised by the Medu Cultural Ensemble in 1982, and the Cultural Voice of Resistance – Dutch and South African against Apartheid in December 1982.
At the opening of the Culture in Another South Africa Festival, the ANC, which at the time had been banned and was in exile, addressed the South African artists with: “We can never be exiled from our homeland because daily your songs, your poems, your plays, your paintings and films – magnificent manifestations – keep our attention riveted to our inevitable freedom.”
The ANC also acknowledged that it was through the excellent work created by South Africa’s resistance artists that friends and supporters of South African artists living in the Netherlands were able to take a principled stand against apartheid. At the 1987 festival in Amsterdam, the ANC proclaimed that “our art springs directly from the experiences that have been moulding our national consciousness over the centuries to the present”.
The Culture in Another South Africa Festival called on South African artists to celebrate a vision of “another South Africa” which would be united, non-sexist and non-racial.
There is no doubt that South African artists who play on the world’s international stages are ideal ambassadors to celebrate that vision.
The reality, however, is that the “another South Africa” that was envisaged by the ANC has fast become a victim of its own current leadership weaknesses.
South African artists have not failed to deliver that dream of “another South Africa”.
The challenge is for the ANC to rise up to the challenge at this year’s Mangaung conference and to rededicate itself to that vision of another South Africa that it spoke about in Amsterdam 25 years ago.