Whet your appetite for a massive ‘banquet of the arts’ featuring close to 400 productions in 59 venues, to be enjoyed by a range of local to international visitors from 28 June to 8 July.
Whet your appetite for a massive ‘banquet of the arts’ featuring close to 400 productions in 59 venues, to be enjoyed by a range of local to international visitors from 28 June to 8 July.
This year Grahamstown and the National Arts Festival (NAF) will host the first World Fringe Alliance get-together.
Formed last year and chaired by Festival CEO Tony Lankester, this alliance is a bid to foster inter-country exchanges with productions on the Fringe programme; to jointly market Fringe festivals and generate interest in the arts from global sponsors.
“We were blown away by the support and encouragement from the eight-country members,” said Lankester. “All of the members have been invited to attend our 2012 Festival; and we’re hoping to welcome them all in June.”
The eight international festivals taking part are from Brighton (United Kingdom), Prague (Czech Republic), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Los Angeles, New York (both from United States), Perth, Adelaide (both from Australia) and Grahamstown. Between all these arts festivals, they have a combined audience of 1.5-million, Lankester said.
“By hosting this gathering we’re hoping to use the Alliance to promote Grahamstown and South Africa’s artists on a global platform.” Some core pieces of the Main programme are the cutting-edge works of the 2012 Standard Bank Young Artist Award winners, who continue to challenge and explore new directions as they establish their artistic voices.
The winners will present a varied and exciting programme of premieres. On the theatre stage is Princess Zinzi Mhlongo with her show Trapped, which travels to Austria after its world premiere in Grahamstown. Bailey Snyman presents a dance play – Moffie – inspired by Andre Carl van der Merwe’s eponymous novel.
Soprano Kelebogile Boikanyo performs as the soloist in the Gala Concert as well as in her own soiree in the Rhodes Chapel. Mikhael Subotzky takes audiences on a multi-media journey behind the lens in his work entitled Retinal Shift.
Pianist Afrika Mkhize forms part of the immensely popular Jazz section of the Festival programme, and promises not to disappoint. The Standard Bank National Youth Jazz Festival celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, with a suitably powerful line-up of local and international musicians and teachers.
Brought here not only to perform for the audiences of the National Arts Festival, they also inspire the 350 young South African jazz players gathered in Grahamstown. Another exciting aspect of this year’s Festival programme is the launch of The French Season in South Africa, staged with the support of the French Institute in South Africa, the Embassy of France and the South African Department of Arts and Culture.
The launch sees several productions premièring, across several genres. Ster City, an exciting multi-disciplinary production by French theatre-maker Jean-Paul Delore, is the featured production in the Theatre programme.
Once again this year the Arena continues to provide challenging content to bridge the gap between the Main and the Fringe programmes. The Fringe programme serves as an accurate barometer of the state of the arts from all angles, and continues to push boundaries on every level, as a platform for debate on current issues both socially and politically.
The Festival's artistic committe chairperson, Jay Pather said this year's programme is packed with excellence and innovation. “Not without challenges faced by the country in general, it is nevertheless an abundant, rich and diverse programme. Most importantly it makes conscious attempts to extend the range of work from the classical to the cutting-edge contemporary,” he said.
He was excited to announce that the Festival will offer several inter-disciplinary works and collaborations, and a whole new category of live art that blurs boundaries between genres. These “out-the-box thinking [pieces]bear testimony to a programme that secures the tried and the tested, but that invites and probes works that take risk and break new ground.”
Besides the number of international works, including those from the much anticipated French Season in South Africa, this year's fest is impossible to miss, Pather said.
“There are works across the disciplines that walk a tightrope of edgy aesthetics from such diverse and far flung sources and places, that viewed altogether in one space in just over a week, will make for rich pickings and substantial debate, as we watch this Festival grow in size and authority,” he said.
Bookings for this year’s '11 Days of Amaz!ng' are open and tickets are available through Computicket. Booking kits are available from selected Standard Bank branches, selected Exclusive Books and Computicket branches.
For more information on the programme, accommodation and travel options visit www.nationalartsfestival.co.za. Also join the National Arts Festival group on Facebook for all the latest news, or on Twitter (@artsfestival).
Fest in numbers:
32 tons of additional equipment will be brought into Grahamstown to help transform every corner of the city into a performance space.
59 venues will be used – more than ever before.
80 productions make up the Main programme.
390 productions make up the Fringe programme.
400 additional jobs created during the Festival.
1 000 lights will be rigged up across the 59 venues.
200 000 attendees were at last year’s Festival.
R60 million: the amount that that Festival contributes to the GDP of Grahamstown each year.
