Johan in his own Goddard movie (Photo: Nick Konstandaras)
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"What I found so wonderful about Johan was his mixture of innocence and, to quote John Nankin, his Wikipedia brain. Working with him taught me not only to trust my instincts, but to work with precision and always remain open to chance. Playfulness."
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Writing about Johan van Wyk is more difficult than I thought it would be. Johan was elusive, mercurial, never where you thought he would be – like watching a flickering movie projected on a bedroom wall. Too much light in the room, so the images are hard to see – some of it in colour, some of it in black and white.
On the Boksburg farm, circa 1980
Johan standing on the edge of a recently ploughed red field on the farm somewhere near Boksburg. Red dust, the image flickers, gone. Johan’s scuffed slip-on sandals. Johan sitting on the hood of a tractor, his head bowed. The brown, wrinkle-free Terylene trousers he always wore. The colourless cardigan. Again, the desolate red field, little whirlwinds blowing up red dust. The image flickers. He is gone for a while.
The farm
Sometime in 1978 or 1979, we were sitting on the balcony of my flat in Vredehoek, watching the cable cars against the slopes of the mountain. We were fascinated by the moment they crossed. One going up, one going down. Kabelkarnimfe. We did a lot of automatic writing. Southern hemisphere surrealists. We decided to write a book together. Then it became a magazine. I can’t remember what happened next, if something ever got published.
Actually, we ended up referring to ourselves as Dadaists. I had a little performance venue in Sea Point – just a few rooms with no doors and no working toilet, but good enough. Bare light bulbs hanging from peeling ceilings. We staged a few performances there: Afrikaans Dada. We wrote a manifesto which a stark naked Marcel van Heerden recited to a very rapt audience. Now lost – like everything from that time, apart from one poster that miraculously survived.
Fearless Marcel, game for anything, took the brunt of many of our performance ideas in those days. Matinee idol Marcel was willing to take chances and was central to whatever it was we were doing. The thing is, he understood Johan, and somehow managed to portray Johan’s elusive way of thinking.
At the time, we didn’t have much interest in documenting or preserving anything, something I now regret. We were on the fringes, on the outside. And we liked it that way. To say that we were rebelling is not quite accurate. We certainly were rebellious. We were also bored. There wasn’t much happening that we found inspiring. So, we created things that we wanted to experience, performances that we wanted to see. There was no internet in those days, no easy access to art movies. Word would spread that someone had got hold of a Godard movie: renting a 16-mm projector, threading reels of film, splicing it back together when the fragile film snapped. Flickering images against someone’s bedroom wall. Censored. A world out of reach.
It was around that time that I made my first movie, Angsst, with Marcel van Heerden. I made it because I wanted to make an Afrikaans movie that I wanted to see. Johan was part of it. We talked about it. We spent long nights talking about it. Like so many other projects, Johan was there, in the background somewhere, in the shadows, with his lopsided, shy smile. An instigator. The shy provocateur in wrinkle-free trousers and a colourless cardigan.
Johan and I were on the set (a dilapidated old Art Deco apartment on the edge of Yeoville overlooking Bez Valley) of Angsst the first morning, sitting on the floor, leaning against a wall, when Marcel van Heerden arrived for the shoot. I introduced them. According to Marcel, I called Johan the best Afrikaans poet. I probably did. It was so low-key – a passing moment. But without our realising it at the time, it was a moment that would have quite a huge impact.
Sitting on the floor, leaning against a wall – we spent a lot of time sitting on floors, leaning against walls somewhere, Johan and I. The Wits student union – we used to sit there for hours. There were regulars like Lulu Davis. Neil Goedhals. Sometimes Nick Konstandaras, Jeff Lok, Joachim Schonfeld, Nadine Cohen.
When the floor got too hard, we would take a break from the student union and hang out in Marcus de Jongh’s bookshop, a block away from the Wits campus. Legend had it that Marcus imported banned books tucked between consignments of Bibles. We were totally broke in those days and would spend hours sitting between the bookshelves, reading books we couldn’t afford. Every now and again, Marcus would pass one of us a book and wink. Bring it back when you’re done. And don’t tell the cops where you got it. Things were like that, in those days.
The image on the wall flickers, black and white. We’re sitting in Neil Goedhals’s flat on Cavendish Street in Yeoville. Neil had barely any furniture. So, I’m on the floor with two of the quietest, most introverted individuals on the planet. Nothing is said. Drum set, guitars, wires everywhere, a reel to reel recorder. Strangely, after a visit to Neil, it always felt like we had had hours of intense conversation.
After Angsst came Die moord, starring Marcel and Jacqui Singer. Neither of my movies were financial blockbusters, needless to say. Although Marcel and I wanted to keep working together, I found the whole process of finding financing for the movies totally exhausting and depressing and decided to take a break. So, it was back to Cape Town.
Every time I drove to Cape Town, Johan would hand me a few cassette tapes of music that he’d recorded. This is important stuff, he would say. I had an old VW Combi, one of those old ones with a split windscreen. I wedged my cassette player onto the dashboard and blasted Johan’s music full blast. Well, let me say this. After many hours driving through the Karoo, listening to Pere Ubu, Can and Messiaen’s Quartet for the end of time, I was just about ready to shoot myself.
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But that was Johan. He heard stuff that nobody else did.
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Music to drive by, Johan – road music. The next time he handed me three cassettes, he singled one out. Pay attention. These guys are important porto-punks. Turned out to be Them’s debut album from 1964. It was great road music, but I spent most of the drive trying to figure out why the hell Johan thought they were porto-punk. But that was Johan. He heard stuff that nobody else did.
A few months after filming Die moord, I got a call from Marcel asking me to come up to Joburg to direct Johan’s new play, Wieretuin, at the Market Theatre. Johan’s new play? Since when was Johan a playwright? Well, it was actually a series of letters written by a guy named Trollop to a woman named Aletta. Marcel was to play Trollop and Aletta Bezuidenhout – well, Aletta. Never mind the fact that at that point, the only play I had ever seen in my life was when my high school forced us to attend a Pact production of Chekhov’s The seagull, starring Sandra Prinsloo. How Marcel managed to talk Barney Simon and Mannie Manim into doing this production, only he knows.
Because neither Johan nor I knew anything about theatre, we decided not to approach it as a theatre piece. We were complete outsiders. My references were movie directors like Godard and Antonioni, and the visual arts – Dada and surrealism. I decided to try and convey the gorgeous clarity of Johan’s writing visually. We had absolutely no interest in creating any kind of narrative structure. More characters were added at random.
Because we weren’t constrained by theatrical traditions, we felt totally free to play. As I mentioned before, we weren’t rebelling. We wouldn’t have known what to rebel against. Johan’s writing is deceptive. Although it seems spontaneous, he was a great craftsman and brought an incredible precision to his writing. As Wieretuin developed, a similar pattern started to emerge. What seemed spontaneous was actually rehearsed over and over. I think the actors were secretly going crazy. There is a scene where Aletta lights Trollop’s cigarette, which we rehearsed for days on end. Trollop turns his head. Count one, two, three. Aletta flicks the lighter. Count one, two, three. Trollop leans in. One, two, three. He puffs.
When the work finally hit the stage, it seemed like chaos on wheels, barrelling head-on at the audience. There was a kind of irreverent exuberance to it that seemed like anarchy hinged on absolutely precise timing. It would have fallen flat otherwise.
Neil Goedhals was going to record the soundtrack, but then we actually decided to put him on stage with all his electronic gadgets. Neil was the unpredictable element and hugely enhanced the spectacle of chaos unfolding on stage.
Back in Cape Town, I managed to talk John Slemon into letting me do Die verlate skoolmeisie at the Baxter, again with Marcel van Heerden. I think it helped that Barney Simon agreed to be in it. He sat in the background, working on his typewriter, but still, he actually was on stage. And there I was doing theatre, thanks to Johan van Wyk, the stealth instigator.
What I found so wonderful about Johan was his mixture of innocence and, to quote John Nankin, his Wikipedia brain. Working with him taught me not only to trust my instincts, but to work with precision and always remain open to chance. Playfulness. To be a craftsman. I created most of my early theatre work without ever really seeing any theatre. And it was my friendship and working relationship with Johan that gave me the artistic self-confidence just to bulldoze ahead. He was the prism through which I saw things. I think that’s what made him unique. His ability to inspire, to instigate, and then disappear. Like a flickering projection on a wall somewhere in a Yeoville flat with barely any furniture. That lopsided smile, gone, forever.
I once read something somewhere about the Russian poet Mayakovsky floating, drifting sideways across the Moscow skyline. Perhaps I’m imagining it. But I can see our own poet, Johan, drifting sideways across the Joburg skyline. Smiling lopsidedly.
See also:
Herinneringe aan Johan van Wyk – nuwe beginne en ’n bestel begin stuiptrek