Author: Kate

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Virtual Black Out: Experiments in the Future of Form – Pop Art / FukugeziPOPArt Theatre & Fak’ugezi Digital Arts Festival

‘Virtual Black Out: Experiments in the Future of Form’ takes a bold step into digital “space” making for virtual theatre and performance. Starting with experienced scenographers and digital arts in a collaboration of skills in space, set, light, location and time this project engages form as the spark for new collaboration in digital theatre making. POPArt and Fakugesi Festival come together to bring into collaboration a stellar group of writers, directors, actors, scenographers and digital artists from South African and beyond to produce five short unique and diverse experiments in the future of form.

Co-Ordinators & Creative Support:
Tegan Bristow (Fak’ugezi Digital Arts Festival)
Hayleigh Evans (POPArt Productions)
Dintshitile Mashile (POPArt Productions)
Mwenya Kabwe
Jenni Lee Crewe
Theatre Makers:
Mongiwekhaya
Baeletsi Tsatsi
Katlego Chale
Francesco Nassimbeni
Lindiwe Matshikiza
Roberto Pombo
Carla Fonseca
Rob Murray
Tshego Khutsoane
Gerard Bester
Billy Langa
Teresa Phuti Mojela
Liezl De Kock
Nicola Pilkington
Scenographers:
Jayne Batzofin
Noluthando Lobese
Craig Leo
Vaughn Sadie
Hannah Lax
Digital Artists:
Kombo Chapfika
Natalie Paneng
Meghan Judge
Vanessa Lorenzo
Xopher Wallace

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Lagos at Large – Electric South

World Premiere at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2019 A poetic essay and an uneasy love story, Lagos at Large is a tribute to the largest city of Nigeria by poet Njideka, a daughter of the diaspora living in Austria. The short film is a lyrical collage told in short segments, as we plot a course through the noise and urban chaos, made pressing and real in VR. Navigating through different city spaces, marketplaces, public monuments, sites of leisure, mass transit, and crowds and cars passing through busy city arteries, the artist asks shrewd, unflinching questions of her surroundings. With a manner both playful and acerbic, between spoken word and memoir, the narration unfolds difficult questions of class division, international development, economic policy and the differences between those who return to the country from abroad and the people who never left. The piece is a tour through the imaginary as well as the material space of Lagos, blending autobiographical and critical engagement. Lagos at Large is supported by Electric South, imisi3D and IDFA DocLab and will enjoy its South African Premiere at the National Arts Festival 2020.

Director: Jumoke Sanwo
Producer: Caitlin Robinson
Executive Producers: Judith Okonkwo, Ingrid Kopp, Steven Markovitz
Editors: Joey Ekunwe Olayeni Balogun
Spoken Word: Njideka Iroh Pelumi Lawal
Original Music Composer: Osarumen Osamuyi
Production Director: Judith Okonkwo
Cinematographer: Joey Ekunwe
Developer: Isiaq Gbadamosi
Sound Design: Osarumen Osamuyi, Joey Ekunwe

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META | m o r p h – Darkroom Contemporary

At the intersection between art and technology, META | morph speaks to digital disruption and its effects on our human experience, today and in the near future. Digital and virtual connections weave us together, creating new modes for connection, while simultaneously causing isolation. The work immerses the viewer in a dreamscape where the dialogue between real and virtual, human and digital, collides indefinitely.

Concept & Direction: Inka Kendzia & Louise Coetzer
Music: Brydon Bolton, Mr Sakitumi, Shane Cooper, Matthijs van Dijk
Choreography: Louise Coetzer
Projection Art, Visual Effects & Compositing: Inka Kendzia
Performed by: Christopher Sherwood – Adcock, Farnel Smart, Mukovhe Monyai, Carla Scholtz, Gabriel Mehlomakhulu
Lidar Scan & 3D: Jason Stapleton
Videography: Oscar O’Ryan & Inka Kendzia
Edit: Oscar O’Ryan
Coding: Lasse Manson

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Woolworths – Juliet Jenkin

Lee-Anne wants to go shopping, Jason wants to be American, and Emily just wants to get married! But why can’t Karen sleep at night? And what is that noise outside? There’s something out there. There’s a shadow in the garden, a shape at the bottom of the swimming pool, a breathing at the top of the stairs, and a face, a face, a face in the mirror.
Writer and Director: Juliet Jenkin
Performers: Alice De Beer, Wynand Ferreira, Alicia McCormick, Kaylee McIlroy, Francesco Nassimbeni, Tazmé Pillay and Johann Vermaak.
Sound Production: Pete O’ Donoghue
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Who Do We Come to H(a)unt – Marcio Carvalho

WHO DO WE COME TO H(A)UNT is an interactive art project that uses drawing to disrupt the memorial culture advertised by statues, monuments and memorials of colonial and imperial rulers still standing today in many cities around the globe. Anybody from any geography can use this project as a healing site where alternative stories can be draw and told and where old hegemonic histories can be re-customized.

Creator: Marcio Carvalho
Drawings by: Marcio Carvalho in collaboration with a wider audience
Design: Joana Silva
Web developer: Dinis Simões

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Unfathomable – Wise & Great

Winner of a Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award on the 2019 National Arts Festival Fringe, Unfathomable is an image-based work that wades, drifts, floats through the waters of unprocessed grief. It seeks out the ghostly presences of those gone and those still alive, to understand their liveliness in death, their ghostliness in life. Tracing the histories of her father and grandmother in a poetic play between materials, body and words, Alex Halligey takes audiences on a swim through lives that couldn’t be contained and those that stayed small for the fear of the size of their spirit. Unfathomable combines Athena Mazarakis’s theatre-making, choreographic and embodied devising approach, Alex Halligey’s writing and performance and Jenni-Lee Crewe’s design. The 2020 Virtual National Arts Festival provides an opportunity to reimagine the work as a series of filmed vignettes.

Director: Athena Mazarakis
Performer: Alex Halligey
Work devised and reconceptualised for film: Athena Mazarakis and Alex Halligey
Designer: Jenni-Lee Crewe
Film editor: Jessica Denyschen

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Together Apart – Nico Athene, Francis Chouler, Loren Loubster, Gabe Gabriel, Kiroshan Naidoo and Kathleen Stephans

Nico is locked down with a group of artists isolating together in an artist residency. Unable to perform her original project as no one is allowed on or off the premises, she has to come up with another in order to legitimise her presence at the residency, and her sex work practice as ‘art’. The liminal conditions of a level five lockdown seem to create a place beyond time, bringing new opportunities and problematics to the performance of intimacy, that further blur the uneasy boundaries between fact and fiction… The work features the talents of a largely queer collective with backgrounds in film, theatre, fine art, performance, activism and documentary including Loren Loubster, Kiroshan Naidoo, Gabe Gabrielle, Kathleen Stephans, Nico Athene and Francis Chouler.
Written and Produced by
Francis Chouler and Nico Athene
Created with and filmed by the Creative Collective:
Loren Loubster (Nico)
Kiroshan Naidoo (Henry)
Gabe Gabriel (Aleks)
Kathleen Stephens (Greta)
With additional performances by
Sihle Shona (Monde)
Amy Louise Wilson (Emilia)
Buhle Ngaba (Busi)
Rosa-Karoo Louw (Michaela)
and Goa as Clement Greenburg
Directed by Francis Chouler and Nico Athene and the Creative Collective
Cinematography and editing by Gabe Gabriel
Additional Camera
Elliot Naude
Francois Knoetze
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The Wretched – Tumit Sparkle (pty) ltd

”The Wretched is a sonic conceptual/theoretical project which is an interpretation of a written text (The Wretched of the Earth) by Frantz Fanon (psychologist, revolutionary, intellectual) . The outfit consists of the award winning jazz vocalist Gabi Motuba, drummer and scholar Tumi Mogorosi and avant-garde sound-scape artist Andrei Van Wyk. This project explores the sound through the lens of a shriek, a scream, a moment at the end of the limit of struggle. Theoretically this aligns itself with a history of sonic writing that has been the means to deal with trauma or as refrains of such.” – Tumi Mogorosi

Artists:
Gabi Motuba – Vocals
Tumi Mogorosi – Drums
Andrei Van Wyk – Sound-scape Artist
Producer:
The Wretched
Photographer:
Anthony Kaminju
Production Team:
Whoosh Solutions
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The Voice in Your Head – Imaginary Stage

The Voice in Your Head lives in many different genres: at times a performance and at other times a participatory game exploring the nature of thinking, expressing, connecting. The Voice in Your Head also offers a lively commentary on the nature of performance, it’s a playful series of experiments around what it means to be “actor” and “audience” within the shared “space” of Zoom. Drawing on his research into Mindfulness, Prof Anton Krueger presents a live exploration of our connections with our inner thought processes. The work grows out of his interest in what it means to see and be seen; to speak and be spoken. Each audience is restricted to only 11 people, who must be prepared to have their cameras and microphones on, and be willing to play. The Voice in Your Head grapples with its online medium, playing with shifts between different perspectives, exploring how we relate to our inner monologues.

Writer and Performer: Anton Krueger
Consultant: Lisa Fay

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The Texture of Silence – Cara Stacey, Keenan Ahrends and Mzwandile Buthelezi

The Texture of Silence explores the interface between composed and improvised music and visual art. It brings together various indigenous southern African musical instruments, jazz language, graphic notation for music and the visual explorations of artist Mzwandile Buthelezi. Across disciplines, these three artists use this project to explore both fixed ideas and spontaneous responses and in this way create new music. In a space dominated by male jazz ensembles or dated classical repertoire, this trio concert aims to complicate what “composing” means, to tease out the less common creative spaces – where nyungwe-nyungwe meets charcoal, where musical bow frequencies hum around guitar lines, where dense harmonies follow moving line.

Composers: Cara Stacey, Keenan Ahrends, Mzwandile Buthelezi
Guitar: Keenan Ahrends
Piano, nyungwe-nyungwe, umrhubhe, umtshingo: Cara Stacey
Visual art: Mzwandile Buthelezi
Videography: Romy Brauteseth, Marcus Wyatt