Theatre and Democracy
Enfant terrible of the South African theatre industry, Mike van Graan is a writer, producer, activist, and arts thinker extraordinaire. He is also on an incredibe run of winning awards that spans the last few years since Green Man Flashing really thrust him into the limelight.
At the recent Fleur du Cap Theatre Awards, he was a winner again, making off with the coveted Best New South African Play for Die Generaal, a “searing drama about the effects of violent crime on race relations in post-apartheid South Africa“.
For his acceptance speech, he then went on a customary Mike van Graan state of the arts address that cleverly and wittily was as entertaining as it was incisive. Artslink have just published an extension of this speech and it goes a little something like this:
Theatre and Democracy
Last year’s winner in this category - Lara Foot-Newton’s excellent Karoo Moose – and Die Generaal were both commissioned by the Aardklop Arts Festival to celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2007 – with generous sponsorship from ABSA. These consecutive awards affirm the important role that festivals and the private sector play in producing contemporary South African theatre.
A combination of government policy that has transformed publicly-funded theatres into “receiving houses”, robbing them of funds to produce new work; the sheer bureaucratic ineptitude of the Lottery that presides over vast resources for the arts but lacks the vision, will and capacity to use these resources effectively, and the reactive and limited nature of funding from the National Arts Council, have placed the burden of theatre production largely on the shoulders of the country’s three largest festivals: the privately-funded ABSA Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in Oudsthoorn, the Aardklop Arts Festival in Potchefstroom and the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, that nowadays receives its core funding largely from public coffers.
The nature of arts funding has also ironically polarised theatre-makers in post-apartheid South Africa with Afrikaans theatre generally sustained through the extensive circuit of Afrikaans festivals, with only a limited number of the annual harvest of Afrikaans plays being seen in the country’s premier theatres. Theatre in other indigenous languages is often the preserve of “community theatre” ghettoes that prevent them from eligibility for professional theatre awards, while theatre in English – irrespective of the home language of the theatre makers – is the primary vehicle to access the markets of the National Arts Festival (with its roots in celebrating the English language), the major theatres of the country and the international markets still interested in South African theatre.
Given the proliferation of Afrikaans festivals and their private sector muscle (at least until the recent economic crisis), it is probably no coincidence that three of the four plays nominated in this year’s “Best New South African Play” category are in Afrikaans.
According to an article in the Sunday Times of 8 March 2009, ABSA – a major player in arts funding - is under fire from some politicians for its decision to make funding available to political parties only after the elections. I’m not sure why the private sector funds political parties at all.
In the arts sector, we often hear that business is reluctant to sponsor the creative activities of artists because of the potentially controversial nature of artistic work. Yet, business happily spends millions on sponsoring sport where hardly a fortnight goes by without some damaging boardroom controversy, or where there is some indiscretion by a leading sports star “role model” or where the sponsored team embarrasses the country – and the sponsor - on the playing fields.
If reluctance to be associated with controversy is a criterion for determining private sector sponsorship, then it is even more inexplicable why business funds biographies of sitting politicians, or political parties that – certainly during election campaigns – sling and attract mud, both for themselves and their sponsors. It is also political parties – particularly those that govern at whatever level of society – that often, simply by virtue of having political power, do controversial things that compromise our nascent democracy and undermine our country’s constitution.
Born nearly a hundred years ago, Gillo Dorfles, an Italian painter (and prolific essayist) wrote that “…art, however one defines it, must mirror, favourably or with hostility, the development of the society to which it belongs. Inevitably, contemporary art too, reflects the complex and divisive social, political and ethical state of our civilisation”.
There’s more, and you can catch it here. Makes for very interesting and absorbing reading. Clever guy, that Mike. Finger always on the pulse of the matter, as much too is his heel on the neck of any miscreant. Would that there were more of him around.
