The Cape Town Festival is here again
by Kim Gurney
Capetonians will once again reclaim the streets as an arts and culture zone when the Cape Town Festival kicks off next month. From mid-March, inner city public spaces will play host to the best in local and international dance, visual arts, music, film, photography, spoken word, theatre and nightlife. Over 70,000 people are expected to attend.
Yusuf Ganief, CEO of the festival, said his focus was to establish the event as a truly African cultural festival. He told Art Throb: "The motivation is to showcase cultural diversity and achieve cultural tolerance, which is the rationale behind everything we do." Ganief cited the 'Stage of Democracy', which will see musicians of different cultures alongside each other. He said: "There might be an Afrikaner and Kwaito musician performing together, for instance. The idea is that we do have different backgrounds but we can enjoy each other's culture."
The festival celebrates the 10th anniversary of democracy, which will be marked in various ways. A visual art exhibition at the Everard Read Gallery will showcase the best of emerging South African artists of the past decade, while an exhibition at Artscape will illustrate the positive and negative aspects of the country's transformation through photographs taken by street kids. The Company Gardens will also see various sculptural and graffiti visual art interventions. Ganief adds: "The anniversary theme will celebrate the freedom of different things including belief, expression, opinion and religion."
An art night route and a series of community mini-art festivals called 'Unleashing Township Vibe' will be hosted in community centres and libraries to fuse modern and traditional arts and crafts. The Company Gardens and Iziko will also host 'Art in the Gardens' that includes a talent show, traditional dancing, music and theatre performances and a traditional healers ritual as well as the 'Democracy X' visual exhibition.
The AVA is playing host to three artists to coincide with the festival. Cobus van Bosch, art critic for Die Burger, has exchanged his pen for his sculpture tools. Innovative new works created from bone fragments depict topographical maps of the sites of important battlefields in the history of South Africa. According to Van Bosch, the exhibition metaphorically addresses issues like slaughter, war, death, memory, history and place.
Arlene Amaler-Raviv will exhibit small recent works, created since her return from the November Havana Biennale, in the main AVA gallery. And Gary Frier, an emerging Cape Town artist, exhibits work upstairs in mixed media using a range of diverse materials and found objects.
For those after a bit more fast-paced action, the nocturnal celebration of the city known as 'Night Vision' will once again claim the clubs, bars and public spaces with an eco-fashion show, the Bo-Kaap After Dark festivities, Social Dance on the Square, three music stages and an emerging artist competition. A fusion of classical string quartet and African percussion comprise the Cap de Classique. And the African Summer Stage, a two-day musical extravaganza featuring the cream of local and international talent, will once again be presented against the backdrop of Table Mountain.
For further information on Cape Town Festival, call Rebecca Atherstone on (021) 465 1166 or visit www.capetownfestival.co.za.
