Shoko can be better than this
WITH the Harare International Festival of the Arts and several other creative platforms out of the picture due to various reasons, chief among them lack of funding, 2016 was an opportunity for Shoko Festival to make its mark.
Themed “Come Alive”, the festival failed to rise to expectations, leaving a very faint print on the memories of those who attended.
Despite having a line-up of hotshots such as Ammara Brown, Jah Prayzah, Winky D and AKA among many others, the festival failed to have the desired impact due to a number of reasons.
Marketing There was no buzz whatsoever around the festival. Not many people knew about it and a number were actually shocked to arrive at the museum where the festivities were taking place and find the usually dusty pathway pimped up for the annual event.
Yes, the marketing was better than in previous years (radio adverts and posters appeared a few days before Shoko) but it still lacked the aggression such events require.
Compare the hype around the upcoming show by Jamaican reggae family, Morgan Heritage. For close to a month now, the streets have been awash with posters and fliers. And even when the dates were changed a week ago, the promoters immediately put new posters up.
The Shoko social media campaigns, it must be said, were quite impressive.
Pricing One of the major challenges for Shoko Festival as a growing initiative is pricing of tickets. This has over the years affected the number of attendees on top of other challenges such as finding a central venue.
Last year organisers decided to change the format of having tickets sold for a specific show and introduced daily all-access tickets.
Instead of buying tickets to individual shows, people would get a day pass giving them entry to all shows on a particular day.
This worked well, with day tickets going for US$ 5 rather than US$ 8 to US$ 15 per show in previous years, and last year’s edition attracted the biggest crowds at Shoko since inception.
Come 2016, the price was hiked to US$ 10. Do we need to mention the cash issues people are grappling with?
Though people came out, it could have been better. What saved the organisers was the availability of crowd-pulling acts on both nights of the festival; with Winky D and AKA opening proceedings, and Ammara Brown and Jah Prayzah shutting things down.
Programming This was the weakest link in the entire festival. There was no clarity to what the organisers were trying to achieve from one performance to the next.
In the end it was more like a three-day concert with each artiste just rocking up on stage doing what they felt was ideal.
It looked like there no creative artistic director to get all the acts together into a flawless chain. There were instances of clear disconnection between what was happening on stage and the audience.
Another typical example of poor planning was having Winky D and AKA performing on the same night.
These are both energetic acts and with the crowd jumping, screaming and dancing to AKA’s groove, they did not have enough energy left to carry them through The Ninja President’s set – making the latter’s act uncharacteristically subdued. Had there been a better mix of acts - for instance having Bryn K, who is more soulful, perform with Winky D - we could have witnessed a lovely build-up to the evening.
Another area where an artistic director would have come in handy was in safeguarding Shoko Festivals’ flagship, the comedy slot.
This year’s comedy was just not on point. Kudos to organisers for having a host of local acts and just one international comedian but delivery from most acts was nothing to laugh about.
The day events were also not crafted in an appealing way. Only a handful of folks would attend the dance and poetry sessions.
Had there been an artistic director to weave things together, it could have been a different story.