Steyn du Toit interviews new Free State Arts Festival director Ricardo Peach about this year's festival.
Ricardo Peach
After taking over from Adri Herbert-Van Veijeren last October, the hard work put in by new Free State Arts Festival director, Ricardo Peach, finally came to fruition on opening night.
Formerly known as Vryfees, over the next six days Bloemfontein will be transformed into a creative hub buzzing with discourse, theatre, music, visual art, public performance, literature and movies.
As one pages through this year’s theatre and live performance programme options, what emerges is a diverse selection of debut works that point towards Peach’s more contemporary alternative, yet still accessible, vision for the festival's future.
From Nieke Lombard’s (Siembamba) puppetry-focused children’s production Falma and Ozzie performer Candy B’s A Taste Of, through to a revival of Sue Pam-Grant's 1989 classic Curl Up and Dye and Lesiba Mabitsela’s new Marikana-inspired public live art performance Die Man in die Groen Kombers, a platform is provided for all.
Kicking off the festival on a high note was Die Wit Perd, a public performance inspired by one of the area’s most famous landmarks. Preceded by a community march through Bloemfontein’s streets, its message was one of potential and inclusivity.
A genre making up the majority of the rest of the theatre debuts is comedy, with Nico Scheepers’s Amper, Vrystaat! no doubt bound to become one of its most popular attractions over the course of the week. Starring Antoinette Louw, Milan Murray and recent Kanna winner Cintaine Schutte (Moeder Moed en Haar Kinders, Die Seemeeu), the production sees three estranged sisters reunite for their mother’s funeral.
Three of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s funniest tragicomedies are performed by (among others) Chris Vorster and Johann Nel in Tsjekhof-triptiek, while in VettieBOEMBOEM lne Fourie chronicles her humour-filled journey of weight loss that began in 2008.
Two dance productions make up the festival’s final two debuts. They are Beneath the Concrete, choreographed by Sizakele Mdi and exploring aspects of fear and its effects on one's body and well-being, and Let’s Eat Hair, adapted from Carl Lazlo’s play by the same name and starring Mark Antony Dobson, Michaela Jade Wilson, Michelle Hoffman and David Griesel.
Following acclaimed and sold-out runs at other festivals these past few years, several must-see works will finally make their way to Bloemfontein this week as well.
After debuting his brand new adaption of the 1879 Henrik Ibsen classic A Doll’s House at last week’s National Arts Festival (NAF) in Grahamstown – where he was also the recipient of this year’s prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist (SBYA) for Theatre award, Christiaan Olwagen’s multiple-Kanna-nominated Dogma is must-see stuff. In it we see this conceptual young director enter into a conversation between the church of his youth and the church of today. Featuring a stellar ensemble made up of Erik Holm, Tinarie van Wyk Loots, Roelof Storm and Albert Pretorius, the play asks difficult questions around faith, suffering and the past.
Revolving around a young man witnessing the deterioration of his parents’ marriage after his dad, a pastor, is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), the work also looks at matters relating to race, disability and fidelity.
Olwagen also directs Saartjie Botha’s Afrikaans adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which boasts a stellar cast led by Marius Weyers and Sandra Prinsloo, after which the production will move to the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town for a run from July 28.
Another production fresh from Grahamstown is LoveZero. Presented by Cape Town's Underground Dance Theatre, it is made up of two pieces: one celebrating the art form that is dance, and the other the games/mathematics that go into choreographing something new.
First up is Cilna Katzke and Kristina Johnstone's Cypher. Conceptualised via all kinds of quirky methods – including the combination of Sudoku, counting to 10 and assigning numbers to real-life things/people important to them – the best advice I can give for when you sit down for the show is to not overthink this playful, tongue-in-cheek ode to the "logic" behind dance; allow yourself instead to be swept away by the piece's minimalist and dark aesthetic (I'd love to see Katzke explore noir at some point), the subtle shifts in its soundtrack, the determined athleticism of dancers Julia de Rosenwerth, Odille de Villiers and Nicola van Straaten, and the reflective state engaging with a Rubik's cube can bring about.
Originally created as the Baxter Dance Festival's commissioned piece last year, Steven van Wyk and Thalia Laric's Mode is, simply put, a dance that celebrates dancing. Dressed in colourful shades of solid and stripe, performers Julia de Rosenwerth, Odille de Villiers, Kopano Maroga, Henk Opperman, Natasha Rhoda and Sherwin Rhode waltz their way through too many different styles of dance to count. With accompaniment by opera singer Robin Botha throughout, this piece only becomes stronger each time it undergoes a transformation.
Told through memory, poetry and digital projections, Erik Holm’s Blou-blou makes for a very powerful, very personal one-man performance, while the Janice Honeyman-directed Bidsprinkaan demonstrates perfectly what happens when an entire cast comes together with the sole purpose of telling a great story.
Cinephiles can also look forward to a range of interesting films screened as part of this year’s Free State Arts Festival clustered around interesting themes such as South Africa, the world, war and peace, and even ballet.
Co-produced by Fugard Theatre founder Eric Abraham, the Polish feature Ida won this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, this captivating black-and-white film tells its story through austere, yet breathtaking images.
The plot revolves around Anna, an 18-year-old WWII orphan raised in a Polish convent. Determined to take her own vows, she is first sent out by her Mother Superior to go to meet her only living relative, the former high-ranked Communist state prosecutor Wanda. In this part mystery, part road trip and part visual diary the viewer gets to follow Anna, whose real name turns out to be Ida, as she travels across the country with her aunt to the village of her birth. Made up of a series of beautiful, meditative moments, however, this is a film best enjoyed for its journey rather than for its haunting destination.
Presenting a fantasy story filtered through a thin layer of disorientation, Etienne Fourie’s Die Windpomp is a daring Afrikaans film that deals with issues of memory, mortality and first love. Based on a multiple AFDA Award-winning short by the same name which Fourie also directed, it is an accomplished, well-written feature in which the unexpected often occurs.
Several other films are also worth sitting down with a box of popcorn for. They include Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Oscar-nominated Leviathan; Lore, Cate Shortland’s WWI-aftermath story of survival; as well as Alain Resnais's 1959 French new wave catalyst, Hiroshima My Love.
The Free State Arts Festival runs until Saturday. For the full show schedule and booking details, see www.vrystaatkunstefees.co.za and www.facebook.com/vrystaatkunstefees.
Photos provided