Revolutionary Trends at the National Arts Festival 2017 (an overview)

Everybody’s festival is different. Each individual charts their own course in navigating this vast, unwieldy, multidisciplinary festival of festivals that happens every year in the Eastern Cape. Since the long running print version of the festival paper,Cuewent under this year when Standard Bank withdrew funding, I wasn’t officially reviewing and this freed me up to play a bit more and to see things that appealed to me, rather than having to attend shows from a sense of obligation. It felt as though I got to sample a good range of the many different festivals on offer in Grahamstown this year, and I really had an excellent time of it, ending up with a wide mix of music, comedy, traditional theatre and more experimental live art, as well as touring the sculpture, painting and digital exhibitions (which included a great 3D experience). Throw in a book launch and a panel discussion, a couple of Korean films and a demo-talk about the history of the slide guitar and it’s a feast. (‘The Weirdest Music I Ever Heard’ was my first encounter with Richard Haslop and definitely a highlight.) I was also involved in the festival in various ways: performing in an improv comedy troupe; talking on a panel at Wordfest (about Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama’s Book of Joy [2016]); presenting at Thinkfest on Mindfulness and Performance Art. This year I was also one of the examiners for theMApieces presented byour DramaDepartment at Rhodes (or UCKAR – the University Currently Known as Rhodes – as it’s creatively been renamed by those impatient for change.) So, I got to engage with various student productions as well. Of course, there’s also the impromptu late-night festival that happens when you bump into friends and meet artists after midnight at the Long Table or the Bowling Club. That’s where you get a sense of which shows are sailing along, and which are barely keeping afloat, punctured irreparably below the waterline by technical difficulties or a wounding review. This meeting and talking and drinking and eating together is also very much part of the festival. Making connections and being open to encountering the unexpected adds to the uncontainable, unframeable open energy of the festival experience, celebrating beauty, critiquing ideas, sharing experiences, cultures, emotions. Festivals are excessive.