Category: Curated vNAF

#I’mnotdyingjustmeantforflying There is an ancient belief that swans burst into song with their final breath. Set in a tiny box flat in Johannesburg, Swan Song is a coming of age tale, tracing the journey of a young Tswana woman from Taung born with a winged scapula – a symbol that mirrors a constant struggle for belonging, of home. Swan Song wrestles with the metaphors of grief and love mapping the way in which they physically manifest and become intertwined with life. The film draws the audience into her nest, an intimate space where they witness her grappling to tie together past and present, working through her memories as if enduring physical labour, en pointe. As she descends into her final moments; she pivots from the crippling vulnerability that loving demands, to the brazen fearlessness of having loved.

SWAN SONG, a Maru Factory Film produced in association with Nicolette J Moses, co-produced by the National Arts Festival, presented as part of the Virtual National Arts Festival 2020
Writer: Buhle Ngaba
Performer: Buhle Ngaba
Director: Ilana Cilliers
Director of photography 1: Nicola Pilkington
Director of photography 2: Matt Griffiths
Original Score: Ilana Cilliers
Original Artwork: Amy Rusch
Video Art: Sitaara Stodel
Choreography: Shaun Oelf
Lighting and Technical Design: Matt Griffiths
Production Design: Ilana Cilliers & Amy Rusch
Post-production & Film Edit: Nicola Pilkington, Ilana Cilliers & Matt Griffiths.
FOR NATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL:
Merle Gideon – Onsite Venue Manager
Moegamat Cloete – Stage Services
FOR ARTSCAPE:
Marius Golding – Director of Operations
Yusuf Abrahams – General Manager Stage Services
Liam Cookson – Head of Sound
Faheem Bardien – Head of Lighting
Moegsien Davids – Stage Manager
David van Deventer – Front of House Manager
David Pamplin – Front of House
Manual Benans – Health & Safety and Security Manager
The original stage production was first performed at Uitkampteater, KKNK (2017)
Producer: Maru Factory
Writer: Buhle Ngaba
Performer: Buhle Ngaba
Director: Ilana Cilliers
Original score: Ilana Cilliers
Original artwork: Amy Rusch
Production Design: Ilana Cilliers & Amy Rusch
Stage Manager: Amy Rusch
The stage production was staged and performed at: The Alexander Bar (2018)
The Fugard Studio – Shakespeare For Social Justice Conference (2019) Vrystaatfees (2019)

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

”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

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

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

In 2018 then cricket captain, 26 year old Steve Smith was at the center of a ball tampering scandal that shook international cricket. When he arrived back in Sydney after the debacle (which reached it’s Zenith at Cape Town’s Newlands stadium), he had to face a room full of journalists and apologise. At the press conference Smith valiantly stumbles through a prepared statement and then he falls apart . It’s the perfect performance of arrogance chopped off at the knees. These four minutes of footage have been recreated by Jemma Kahn, with an astounding mimicry of the withered Smith by De Klerk Oelofse. Together they have created a loving and mocking portrait, in the style made ubiquitous by TikTok and Drag Race – the lip sync. Jemma Kahn has always enjoyed a lo-fi aesthetic and her film making continues in this tradition – shot on an iPhone 4 with prestik as a tripod and edited herself – she takes a simple technology and then pushes it, creating something scruffy, charming and utterly original.

Film by Jemma Kahn
Starring De Klerk Oelofse
Featuring Albert Pretorius
Art & lighting by Jemma Kahn and Rocco Pool

In a project titled Ponte Maputo Durban, pianist Sibusiso Mash Mashiloane from Durban and multi-instrumentalist Matchume Zango from Maputo have reinterpreted each other’s works. The music journeys through an improvised language of a lifetime learned sonic therapy, which takes the listener along every note towards a form of healing.  South Africa and Mozambique are sovereign neighbours who historically share an umbilical cord, which breaths from the beat of the same rhythmic pulse. This music pulls worlds once parted by colonial separations together when these maestros construct Ponte Maputo Durban sonically. This project is a significant musical and cultural experience in the form of a collaboration. The potential for any listener to reap the benefits of connecting to something so boundless as musicianship, is almost like removing physical borders in the global map of sound.

Sibusiso Mash Mashiloane – Musician and Composer
Matchume Zango – Musician and Composer
Simanga Zondo – Photography
Mandisa Buthelezi: Editing Director
Mduduzi Nxele: Editor
Marlyn Ntsele – Executive producer

Mamela Nyamza is a dance artist and activist who is hell-bent on exposing the sordid underbelly of the bureaucratic aspects of arts and culture in her native country South Africa. Her numerous acts of protests for transformation and equality in the art sector has meant experiencing and being exposed to untoward practices as both an arts practitioner as well as a former employee of a public art institution. Ms Nyamza’s new work “PEST CONTROL” aims to expose the real state of the art in South Africa – a sordid environment where cronyism and nepotism are rife and arts practitioners at odds with this malignant system, are screwed. A miscarriage. An injustice. “PEST CONTROL” addresses these mutually beneficial ‘friendships’, where kowtowing artists are advanced at the expense of the arts sector.

Performed by: Mamela Nyamza
Featured Artist (Musician): Aza Mphago
Lighting & Set Designer: Wilhelm Disbergen
Camera & Graphic Designer: Ntombazana Shabangu
Digital Media Creative: Katty Vandenberghe