A Conspiracy Of Clowns

Need to get this all down before Festival slips completely out of frame…it has that tendency to do that – a huge intense build up, the explosion of the 10 days itself, and joy or frustration at how it all went, then it gets psychologically packed away until the whole cycle starts again next year.  Believe it or not, we are trying to learn./  It might not seem that way sometimes, but we are.

These not really in an order, more how they came to me:

The Good:

1. Pictures of You – yes, because it was the highest grossing theatre  production on the Fringe, but also because Liezl and Dorian took a step into the sublime.  The show was good before, and we’ thought we’d reached some kind of plateau…but at festival it got better.  And proved not only the strength of the Fringe and independence, but sticking to one’s guns, following one’s heart, “and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make”.
2. Tony Lankester – CEO of the festival.  This guy is smart, he’s funny, he’s passionate, and he gives a shit.  Not only to artists as business people but to people as human beings.  True, he has his detractors (see below), but he learns and grows from things.  See here for another take on this.
3. Cape Town Edge – now having done 3 years, it has settled into the Fringe make-up, and this year was bigger, brighter, bolder, with a line-up of new shows and Festival returns in a programme for all tastes.  Furthermore, we had an equipment upgrade (a computerised board!), a venue upgrade (FOH bar and black drape surround – practically a real theatre), and this year we rocked out with selling sushi in the tent.  There will be more on Cape Town edge soon.  Strangely, every year we hear about other groups doing similarly, but this has yet to emerge properly.  Except for the New Joburg Underground…who knows anything about the New Joburg Underground?
4. The “Hands On! Masks Off!” initiative and “The Remix Laboratory” initiative.  Both programmes jam-packed with networking meetings, workshops, cultural events, sharings, learnings and experiences.  Kudos to Ismail Mohamed, Kate Axe Davies, and everybody who participated, organised, or assisted in their operation.  At times there was almost too much, particularly for this tired moegoe who (have I mentioned this already?) didn’t get a lot of time off to see/do stuff.
5. The Famished Road directed by Helen Iskander and produced by Fresco Theatre Company on the Main.  I couldn’t see many, but this was my show of Festival.  Based on Ben Okri’s book and other writings, the show is a magical visual feast.  Surprisingly wordy for the approach taken, and not perfect yet, but it is brand new, and I am sure it just continued to get better and better as it settled and was tweaked.  I hope it has a long life on South African stages.  It deserves to.  Fresco is doing stuff with such grace and polish that it is inspirational for us scruffy little clowns.

The Bad:

1. The divide of Grahamstown – Brett Bailey used it expertly in his piece Blood Diamonds by all accounts, and it’s always been there, but for some reason this year it was just a lot more evident.  Part of that was the Village Green moving up into the University, and really showing the racial divide: from Church Square to the township black, from Church Square to top residences white.  OK, that’s a gross generalisation, but you see where I’m going.  This poses a real quandry for theatre makers, because on the one hand you just want to go to Grahamstown and show your art, and watch art, and talk art and catch up and jol…but you can’t escape the poverty and desperation of the Eastern Cape and the Frontier that hasn’t been solved.  So what does one do?
2. The Village Green moving – now this actually didn’t impact hugely on us…it’s been a good 5 or 6 years since I combed the stalls looking for those 2 or 3 awesome things you could only get in Grahamstown, and you looked forward to each year.  But there was quite an ugly situation with traders in Fiddler’s green feeling neglected and passed over for the professionalism or elitism of the new Village Green up on the Great Field.  At one point, there were bubblings of an inverse Xenophobia with Northern African traders threatening to march on the Green and rip it to shreds.  Kudos to Lankester and co for handling the situation as well as they did, as well as freely admitting their miscalculation and taking immediate steps to solve the situation, which did happen and many traders relocated to Church Square.  But it divided the town all over again, with one prominent theatre maker (OK, really drunk at the Long Table) haranguing on and on about it.  Elements of truth, sure, but we have to face it – things are changing. 
3. Fascist guards at Village Green – true, I’ll admit that the situation was potentially getting tense (refer to #2 above), but to bar a group of actors in masks with flyers from the Green with an AK47?  Hmmm.  Tony Lankester again to the rescue!  But then we got barred from the tents another day because we couldn’t be identitfied and might potentially thieve the latest line of winter woolies from Scandinavia.  Did I mention I didn’t get to see much theatre?  There was a lot of logistics and organising and ranting going on. 
4. Boycott #1 – being threatened by a group of directors who accuse the Makana Municipality of sabotaging their Festival and causing loss of income due to their ripping down of posters etc from street signs, traffic lights and so on.  Check here for the Dispatch article, and another blog report here.  Now it’s true that this did happen – I was lucky in seeing them remove our Pictures banner (apparently not allowed on traffic lights - fair enough, same as anywhere else) and had to chase them down to retrieve said banner, but c’mon - some posters being pulled = severe loss of income = boycott?  I dunno about that one, hey.  Everybody knows posters don’t do much other than create a presence and pull maybe a small percentage of your audience in.  Sure, it’s lekker to see theatre makers standing up for themselves and drawing a line in the sand, but this present situation borders on the divisive again, in a time where we need more than ever to be pulling together.  Is it the municipality’s fault?  Are the directors overreacting?
5. Boycott #2 – this is one that goes even further, as it picks out individuals and has a really nasty edge to it.  There’s this “figure” called James Norton, not his/her real name (it would be so much better if they just came out into the open), who is calling on all artists and crafters to boycott the festival, sack Lankester, and basically turn the clock back 15 years or so to what the festival used to be.  I’m serious.  I first thought this was a joke, or an elaborate publicity prank, but apparently not.  Check out the Facebook group here.  It’s like an ironic backwards version of “Hot Fuzz”.

And an Ugli point of view:

Well, I think it’s all been said really.  Both in this blog, and on others like Meganshead and Artsblog.  Festival is changing, and has been so for the last few years.  This year was a big jump forward, and who knows how 2010 will truly pan out. 

But it’s changing and we need to change with it.  It’s still the national  arts festival, it still is hugely (if at times overly) ambitious, and things like the Fringe remain fiercely independent and democratic. 

It’s getting harder and harder to make a buck, but that’s true throughout the entire industry.  Even having the highest grossing theatre production on the Fringe doesn’t mean that we’re now retiring.  It means we actually have a few coins to jangle in our pockets, but we haven’t suddenly become rich.  More than anything, it has given us an enormous opportunity that we need to take full advantage of.  And that, for me, is the saving grace of festival – it’s an opportunity.  Perhaps the greatest one in the country, because for 10 days the serious theatre and arts lovers conjoin in a small town on one of the faultlines of South Africa.  It’s not perfect.  It’s grubby and messy and fractured and we have a real love/hate relationship with it.  But that’s OK.  Like any relationship, it needs work.  It needs support, and it needs to give us support.

We need to be more serious, without losing our senses of humour.  We need to get together more, find a way of working together, collaborate, join a collective, work in partnership with the Festival offices, work in partnership with businesses and funders and sponsors and patrons, we need to get organised, we need to evolve.  If we actually give a shit about it all.  And we do.  we all do.  We all should.

Because, in the end, “the love we take is equal to the love we make”.  Hit it.