Grahamstown set to come alive with the National Arts Festival
by Kresta Tyler Johnson
From July 1 to 10, Grahamstown will be transformed from a university town to an art mecca. Celebrating its 30th anniversary, the National Arts Festival promises a cultural feast. From children's shows to opera, from theatre to performance art, and the visual arts to film, there is something for everyone.
Two exhibitions in particular are worth attending. One is curated by Brenda Schmahmann and will be held at Alumni Gallery at the Albany History Museum on Somerset Street. The second is an exhibition of work by Kathryn Smith. Schmahmann's exhibition follows the successful publication and launch of her authoritative book Through the Looking Glass: Representations of Self by South African Women Artists. The exhibition will travel after September to the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum in Port Elizabeth and the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg before ending at the Durban Art Gallery in June 2005.
Kathryn Smith, recipient of the 2004 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art, hopes her exhibition 'Euphemism' will be seen as a work-in-progress. The exhibition revolves around 'Jack in Johannesburg,' a body of work she created in response to British painter Walter Sickert's obsession with the Jack the Ripper murders in Victorian England and Sickert's pieces in public collections in South Africa. Smith's exhibition will travel, being re-created for each venue. It will go to the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum in Port Elizabeth, the National Gallery in Cape Town, the Durban Art Gallery, Bloemfontein and the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg.
A performance piece worth investigating will be the artist Peter Van Heerden living in an ox-wagon for the duration of the National Arts Festival. His 'uitspan' laager will be based at Fort Selwyn, as he attempts to explore the Great Trek and the way that experience may have created environments that shaped contemporary, white, Afrikaans men and the spaces where they define themselves and their masculinity.
Van Heerden has also designed, along with artist Andr� Laubscher, an integral programme that combines performance art, art, and installation, and has artists ranging from painters to sangomas recreating various National Heritage days on each of the ten days of the Festival.
Film events of interest include a 70-minute piece by William Kentridge with live music by the Sontonga Quartet and pianist Jill Richards. Dance is explored in a collaboration between avant-gardist Aryan Kaganoff and dancer Moeketsi Mokoena, while a Van Wyk Louw poem Raka, has become a ballet film.
