National Arts Festival (review)

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Reviewed by:

• National Arts Festival
• April Sizemore-Barber

NATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL. Makhanda, South Africa. June 22-July 2, 2023.

For nearly half a century, South Africa’s National Arts Festival (NAF) has been the premier platform for the artistic state of the nation. Its most recent outing in 2023 marked a hearty post-pandemic rebound, with ticket sales doubling from the previous year’s initial tentative return to live performance. At the same time, COVID’s long interregnum also allowed the festival’s organizers to take stock and adjust the status quo, most notably by substantially curtailing the number of productions featured on the fringe program. This contraction marked a striking departure from the fringe’s previous centrality to the festival’s identity and branding as the second largest after Edinburgh’s. The decision was at its root pragmatic: plagued by years of nationwide rolling blackouts (also known as load-shedding) interrupting performances, the NAF would now limit all performances to venues with a backup generator. Nevertheless, this ethos of strategic contraction had a galvanizing effect on the eleven-day festival as a whole. In prioritizing smaller-scale, local stories and idioms over spectacle and size, the festival thrived with a tighter, more personal focus. Playing to its strengths of combining multiple forms and incubating new voices, 2023’s festival strikingly foregrounded work by Black feminist artists, often working in Indigenous languages.

A broader trend toward responsive, genre-bending, site-specific performance was apparent in the work of the winners of the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Awards. Given a platform at the festival to execute their visions, the winning artists—and their work—provided a model for how constricted performance aesthetics can often inspire spatial reimagination. As an illustrative example, three of the six artists honored—all Black women—staged performance installations at the hulking Settlers Monument complex, a location where generators could be depended on to keep the lights on. Lady Skollie, an Indigenous artist of Khoi descent, used the apartheid-era arts center built to memorialize British colonizers to interrogate the absence of her ancestors from the historical and artistic record. Transforming the bowels of the building into an exhibition of Indigenous rock art, which has largely been destroyed in South Africa, Groot Gat (Big Hole) re-created cave art in situ. The result—referencing capitalist extraction in the famed Big Hole Kimberly diamond mine while also celebrating women’s vaginas as a creative force— served as a South African iteration of the Great Hole of History (introduced in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play). Rather than depicting the artform as a static ethnographic relic, Skollie’s cave paintings vividly imagined a matriarchal origin story for the Khoi, South Africa’s original people.

Several floors above Groot Gat, recording artist Msaki’s Del’ukufa (Dare to Die) spoke to a similar sense of displaced trauma. Playing to a packed audience in a single gallery, the intervention was the first in a series of site-specific public rituals that Msaki staged throughout the festival. Msaki circled and anointed a mound of red soil adorned by candles, crosses, and cattle skulls that evoked the colonial violence marking the Eastern Cape landscape. Her soaring soprano was accompanied by a musician on a straw mat and some smoldering imphepho herb, which is used in ancestral communication: Ndiyozilanda! (roughly, “I am returning to collect my things”). The visuals, sounds, and smells combined to take the audience on a multisensory metaphysical journey, all while standing still. The call evoked a spontaneous, embodied response in three-part harmony from those assembled, as Msaki’s use of aural histories suggested the possibility of both personal and collective healing.

On the ground floor, poet and performer Koleka Putuma invited audiences into her multimedia gallery installation, a meditation on substance abuse in the Black community and the restorative possibilities afforded by Indigenous medicines and psychedelics. Despite being titled A Theatre of Beauty: Imvuselelo (The Revival), Putuma’s installation was less obviously theatrical than her acclaimed solo performance Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In, one of the most memorable outings at the NAF in 2022. Yet such fluidity of form and resistance to easy categorization served as...