National Arts Festival Image Gallery

A bot programmed to read parts of “Futurability. The age o impotence and the horizon of possibility” (2019) to other chatbots, who answer and learn from the conversation due to the successive repetitions of the text. In this book, Franco “Bifo” Berardi analyzes the global order that shapes our politics and our imagination, proposing that the key to a radical change lies in our relationship with technologies. “Futurabilities” is an online action that explores human-automatic conversational possibilities around the current context of connected solitudes. It will run during the whole festival as a virtual performance in progress.

This is how the forgetting begins. A child hears a song the adults of the daytime do not know, because the adults do not know it, they tell a child she is singing it wrong. So the child who can still hear the songs in The Great Symphony without needing to say the prayer folds the song away, deep in the back of her throat.

*

We are sick. We cannot undo what has made us sick. We cannot stay the same.
*
There is an old woman across the river.
She is made of sand and fire, carrying a child on her back.
I cannot reach her she has burned the river dry.
The mud is buried turned angry swallows rocks
and children who still believe in water.
*
This interactive meditation is an urgent search for the song folded in the throat of the child. Poets Vangile Gantsho and Toni Giselle Stuart, and filmmaker Vusumzi Ngxande present a 60-minute poetry and film performance, in the form of meditation, ritual and conversation. Working with the four elements, they explore our relationship to the past, asking, what must be remembered, in order to create new futures for us, especially in this moment of global uncertainty and change? The performance will include an interactive component.

Original Script – vangile gantsho & Toni Giselle Stuart

 Poetry Performance – vangile gantsho & Toni Giselle Stuart

Videography – Vusumzi Ngxande

 Sound Design – Vusumzi Ngxande

 Film Directing, Editing & Producing – Vusumzi Ngxande

 

Bru & Boegie – 2 best friends from South Africa who only wear underpants – need to think big to get people to watch their online shorts so they make South Africa’s first full-length 2D animated movie

Writer, Director, Storyboards, Animator, Voices, Audio – Mike Scott 

Bach wrote six suites for unaccompanied cello and these remain the pinnacle of all solo cello repertoire today. South African cellist, Peter Martens, received rave reviews in amongst others, The Strad magazine for his 2011 SAMA nominated CD set of these works. Martens, currently principal cellist of the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, also enjoys an international career as soloist and chamber musician. He says, “These works have occupied me since the age of eight, when I learned the prelude of the first Bach Suite. They are sublime and profound works, and it is a privilege to have lived with them through performance for the last 40 years.” Each suite is a set of dance inspired movements in the form of a Baroque Dance Suite. The first is optimistic, elegant and simple. A musical journey through the suites takes one through  increasingly  complex and deeply emotive music, until the sixth suite which epitomises a grand cathedral in the music of J.S. Bach. Martens will present one suite each morning as part of the Virtual National Arts Festival.

Composer – J.S. Bach (1685 – 1750)
Artist – Peter Martens (cello)
Producer – Dirkie van der Merwe
Video Engineer – Pierre-Arnold Theron
Sound Engineer – Gerhard Roux
Filmed on location: La Motte – Historic Wine Cellar

Blood and Snow Manifesto is Louise’s intimate account of her journey through Stage 4 Lymphoma and disability.
It embraces themes of illness, trauma, loss, disability and mortality to explore how we construct subject/self based on our own experiences/choices and how those constructions are unavoidably influenced by the world around us. How permeable are we? How strong is our immunity to this often sick/dangerous world?
Is it possible to transform through suffering and loss, what is the difference between cure and healing? How does the long winter begin to turn to spring?
This is Louise’s praise poem to the wonder of the unique aesthetic and choreography of the adapted body.  It is tribute to the extravagant beauty of inimitable form.  It opens discourse on crip p/leisure, grants the witness permission to gaze, controls and redirects the ableist narrative by challenging, “you may look, but what you see will not be what you thought you would see”.
It is a preemptive swan song, lavish grief for our mortality, an attempt to assuage our fear of death.
She also shares a wee tale of divine intervention.
Specifically invited are persons with disabilities, illness, mental health issues.

Concept, visuals, text by Louise Westerhout
Editing by Anwar McWhite

In celebration of Beethoven’s 250th birthday, Jill Richards and Waldo Alexander are delighted to present three of his Sonatas for Piano and Violin. This concert includes the joyous “Spring” sonata, the 1st Sonata in D Major, and the legendary “Kreutzer” sonata.
Beethoven arrived in Vienna in 1792, where he studied with Haydn and Salieri, amongst others. His reputation as a virtuoso pianist was quickly established, and he also studied the violin. He wrote his first violin sonatas, a set of three (Op. 12) in 1797-98; six more were completed by early 1803, a fairly short time span. Beethoven was to write just one more sonata in 1812.
Both the violin and piano were undergoing tremendous changes at the time. The piano’s range and sonority increased in response to a need for more power and a more sustained sound. Violins also underwent changes in construction, with higher bridges, longer necks, fingerboards and strings. These changes meant that Beethoven made steadily increasing technical and expressive demands on both instruments, resulting in a deeply satisfying musical experience for both the modern performer and the listener.

Piano – Jill Richards
Violin – Waldo Alexander