The Eastern Cape government has gone all out to market itself and its cultural strategy. Undaunted, without all the official machinery, certain Cape Town theatremakers are doing a nifty job of branding themselves.
A consortium of independent companies, under the banner of Cape Town Edge has turned Princess Alice Hall, in African Street, into a festival within a festival. Sponsored by Distell with a matching grant from Business and Arts South, they have pooled their resources to present a substantial line-up of theatre, dance, revue and comedy with the credo of "leaving the Fringe for the Edge - Cutting-edge theatre from the Mother City".
Not surprisingly Fringe veteran Peter Hayes and his Hearts and Eyes Collective and heavy hitter Mike van Graan are all part of this initiative which is testing the boundaries of professionalising the Fringe...
On the opening day Cape Town theatre triumphed on the main festival thanks to Magnet Theatre and the Baxter Theatre (see review of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). In Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking the reality of genocide on the African continent is played out on a hessian circus ring of United Nations aid bags.
Mark Fleishman and Jennie Reznek's Magnet Theatre celebrates 20 years of creative sorcery with this painfully exquisite depiction of the personal ravages of war on our continent and South African xenophobia.
Inspired by Judith Rudakoff and the Common Plants Project and Glynis Clacherty's The Suitcase Stories Every Year premiered at a children's and youth theatre festival in Yaoundé, Cameroon, last year. The collaborative input of actors Reznek and Faniswa Yisa and guitarist-singer-composer Neo Muyanga, directed by Fleishman, spin a delicate image-driven web of childhood memories of a girl whose world and relationship with her sister is torn apart to the sound of sharpening machetes ...
Simplicity is the key to this profoundly moving tale about loss and survival. Graphic horrors are implied. A pair of man's shoes placed on the mother's chest ingeniously suggests rape. The performers and Muyanga's music, which he plays on stage, transform the seemingly mundane or the unimaginable into the memorably visceral.
Magnet has developed and defined a style of theatrical mime and humane clowning which goes way beyond formal language.