Woyzeck On The Highveld

The Handspring Puppet Company is performing Woyzeck On The Highveld at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg on 4 - 30 March 2008. (It will also be in Cape Town in May)

It's a multi-media event incorporating the animated drawings of William Kentridge with the Handspring puppets and live performers in an adaptation of German writer Georg Buchner's famous play of jealousy, murder and the struggle of an individual against an uncaring society which eventually destroys him.

The production originally premiered at the Grahamstown Festival in 1992 and was the first collaboration between Handspring and Kentridge. It brings together rod-manipulated puppets and animated film to graphically illustrate Woyzek's tortured mind as he tries to make sense of his external circumstances.

I saw Handspring's brilliant Tall Horse a few years ago, so I'm extremely excited to see another one, especially one featuring William Kentridge animations.

Tickets are available now, and it's not even that expensive. Don't miss it!

The Lion King

What an amazing, larger-than-life experience! I have been yearning to see this show ever since my first glimpse of it at the Tony Awards all those years ago. It has been well worth the wait.

Using a combination of masks, bunraku puppets, body paint and shadow puppetry, the splendour and diversity of an African savannah is created. It's brilliant and the visual animation on stage is truly the essence of the show.

Most of the lead actors have performed their roles before in productions all over the world and with the exception of Scar's Mark Rayment, all are South African.
The first few notes of Buyisile Zama's Rafiki literally sent shivers down my spine.

I enjoyed the local flavour. Shenzi has a Cape flats accent and Pumbaa uses more than a few Afrikaans words. Even little Nala got a huge laugh with a very well timed "Hey Wena!". This kind of thing is often used to gain a few more laughs in regional productions, but here it also helped to strengthen the diversity of the characters.

The wildebeest stampede was incredibly powerful, and with the exception of maybe the opening sequence and Simba's vision of Mufasa, my favourite in the whole show.

It's strange, the theatre itself feels small and intimate, but it seats over 1900 people! It is so well designed that there's basically not a bad seat in the house, since you are no further than 33m for the stage wherever you sit. I love the way the acoustic tiling inside the theatre is reminiscent of woven reeds - distinctly African, but not overbearing.

The best part? I'm going to see it again in July, this time from the front row, courtesy of my really, really cool boss.

The Great Coarse Acting Show

The coarse actor : One who can perhaps remember his lines, but certainly not the order in which they come…he has a desperate desire to impress, is most anxious to succeed, but is hampered by one minor detail – the inability to act.

The Great Coarse Acting Show is a look into the brave world of badly done, amateur dramatics. It comprises of several one act plays including such fantastic modern classics like Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express, A Tale of Two Cities, Aladdin and Phantom Cat Opera Star.

The plays attempt to emulate facets of a fine dramatic performance, and come sadly short once everything has marred them beyond hope of redemption – from the failure of props to falling scenery, from over-acting to under-acting.
Simply put, if anything can go wrong, it does!

We Will Rock You

“The year is 2023. Globalisation has taken its toll. All musical instruments are banned. Everywhere the kids watch the same movies, wear the same fashions and think the same thoughts. It's a safe, happy Ga Ga world. Unless you're a rebel. Unless you want to rock.”

We Will Rock You is a lavish rock musical featuring 32 of Queen's greatest hits as well as a spectacular all South African cast (many of them fresh from last year's Chicago).

Written by Ben Elton (writer of series like Blackadder and Thin Blue Line) , the plot might not be the best part of the show, but it is full of hilarious jabs at the music industry. Anyway, most of the audience didn't care too much about the plot, they were there to be dazzled by the sound and drama of Queen's music.

It is a visual feast with weird and fantastical costumes, frantic lighting and huge screens in the background whose constant animations and live feeds give life to this highly artificial and computerised world.

But what impressed me the most, was the quality of the cast. Vicky Sampson is great as the larger-than-life 'Killer Queen', but it was the vocal talents of Helen Burger as Scaramouche that really impressed me. Murray Todd (Britney) and Talia Kodesh (Oz) is also impressive with their spot-on comedic timing and a flamboyant, but highly confident, stage performance.

The all-local band supporting the actors are also top-notch and you won't be blamed if you think on occasion that they are using the original music for backing tracks. But it's all live.

Rockin' Cinderella

If you are in Pretoria this weekend, go and check out Rockin' Cinderella - a brand new rock opera written by my brother and his best friend!

The Cinderella story is transformed into a sexy, cool production featuring a live band, singers and dancers. A 70's style “Cindy” (played by Shaia Wolf of Isidingo fame) encounters characters both cruel and comical as she progresses through a production packed with superb jazz and rock ‘n roll music written for the show.

They have been working on it for more than a year now, so it is great to finally see the finished product.

Double Dance

I was lucky enough to see not one, but two really great dance productions in one week.

The first one, Danscape, is a showcase of young South African talent that also serves as a fundraiser to support young dancers. A lot of different programmes and academies were involved and the result was a vibrant mix of contemporary, jazz, flamenco and even traditional Indian dance styles.
There was also a beautiful piece by the Remix Dance Project, a group that uses both disabled and able-bodied dancers.

My favourite of the evening was the last piece by Ina Wicterich that was a collaboration between the Jazzart trainees and dancers from all the other schools. I would never have thought that Indian dance moves could work so well when performed to African vocals.

But the most enchanting part was when a little girl of about 2 or 3, sitting in the front row with her parents, became so enamoured with the performance that she jumped up and started dancing too. The whole audience let out an appreciative sigh at the sight of this little person twirling about in a world of her own.

The second piece was La Traviata by the South African Ballet Theatre. We were lucky enough to see one of the performances accompanied by a live orchestra and I think that it made all the difference. Andries Weidemann was in the lead and his dancing and acting went way beyond just the steps and the lifts. There was an ease and maturity to his performance that a lot of the younger dancers lacked. His partner was good not great, but I think she will mature into a stunnong dancer in a few year's time. Her death scene scene was brilliantly done though.

So that's it. Wonderful dancing to remember and Chicago to look forward to in 2 week's time. Life is great.

Slaughter City

A Gothic Thriller

The power of the worker to rise above the system.

The power of the past to change the future.

And the power of desire to make us embrace what we fear most.

Everything from race to women's rights to the politics of sex...

Set in an abattoir, the play explores the interactions of the workers and their managers surrounding an impending strike. The play is also framed by the mysterious character of Cod - a young worker with strange links to the past history of labour struggles, who is continually in conflict with an enigmatic soul known only as the Sausage Man. Neither alive nor dead, man nor woman, by his very presence Cod turns all the assumptions the slaughterhouse workers hold on their heads, and unleashes desires the numbed employees never imagined they would feel again.

The play is written in a style that combines hard-hitting realism with Brechtian expressionism, so that the characters are both real people existing in a concrete place and time, and symbols' of the struggles between labourers and capitalists, men and women, blacks and whites.

The performance space takes the form of an installation combining paintings, puppets and video montage, in and around which the performance takes shape and is experienced
The 'Sausage Man' is a life sized minotaur-like puppet, created in amazing detail by Diek Grobler, from its skeletal body down to the hoof-like stilts the actor has to walk on.

It was written by Naomi Wallace, who grounded the play in the reality of a much publicized 1992 strike against Fischer Packing Company in Louisville, USA. Certain incidents leading up to the strike, including the death of a worker who inhaled ammonia fumes, made their way into the drama. But this production was given a decidedly South African flavour - kudu horns for the sausage man, singing, gumboot dancing and toi-toiing.

Unfortunately, I only saw the production after some technical problems had forced them to move it to a much smaller venue with less than a day's notice. It couldn't have been easy for the cast and crew, but they still managed to pull it off, and the actors are masterful as they mime the cutting and boning of meat at their abattoir work stations.

I would have loved to see it as it was meant to be, with the actors weaving through and around the huge carcasses, but even with a minimalistic stage, 'Slaughter City' was still a powerful, unsettling experience.

Tall Horse

Last weekend I saw a production of Tall Horse by the Handspring Puppet Company. They specialize in using life sized wooden puppets that require up to 3 puppeteers to manipulate. A certain suspension of disbelief is necessary, since the puppeteers are visible the whole time (apparently a traditional Chinese puppeteering style), but once you get used to it, you literally don't even notice the puppeteers anymore, and the puppets come alive. Here, the whole 5 m tall giraffe was handled by just 2 puppeteers on stilts.


The story of Tall horse is based on the life of a giraffe that was caught in southern Sudan, taken up the River Nile in a felucca and shipped across the Mediterranean by the Viceroy of Egypt to be presented as a gift to the King of France. It wintered in Marseilles and in the spring of 1827 took several months to walk to Paris, creating a sensation along the route and, some say, inspired the design of the Eiffel Tower.

Holiday

I can't wait! In less than 4 days time I will be off to Capetown for a midweek break of 3 whole days. The past few weeks have been so hectic that I haven't even gotten around to doing any posts before now. But since the bonus I got for working all through the weekend is paying for this trip, I'm not complaining too much.

Still, I hate that feeling you get when you work really hard to finish a project with an extremely tight deadline, and you actually finish it with time to spare, when the client turns around and tells you that Mr. Whoever can't keep to the original schedule and the project will be extended indifinitely. But the client is always right, so what can a lowly designer do?
Anyway, enough ranting now.

I did get to see Phantom of the Opera in the State Theatre though. It was absolutely amazing! I never knew Andre Schwartz had such a powerful voice. As for the decor - it was some of the best scene changes I have ever seen. My favourite one was probably the whole transformation sequence where Christine sings 'Think of me'. Some of the visual imagery like the drapery falling down after the auction scene and of course the underground river left me sitting there with goosebumps crawling up my back.