There are two concerts at the City Hall this week, and when delving into their background I discovered some inspiring cultural initiatives going on in Cape Town. The first is the Imagine City Hall project (a venture of The Africa Centre, Creative Cape Town and Cape MIC) which is pursuing a vision of the City Hall as a venue dedicated to cultural events, accessible to all. The second initiative is a company called Silent Revolutions run by musicians Lee Thompson and Kesivan Naidoo with the aim of creating a space where musicans have "freedom of expression ... without having to define themselves by genre or by audience." These two projects have linked up to present this concert series, co-inciding with the Spier Contemporary at the City Hall.
The first of these two concerts is on Tuesday 13, when saxophonist Rus Nerwich performs Mantras 4 Modern Man. The ads don't say who'll be playing with him, but the album of the same title features a fabulous line-up including pianist Andre Petersen and drummer Kevin Gibson.
The second concert is on Saturday 17 and it brings together the great traditional Xhosa musician Madosini, who needs no introduction, and the guitarist Derek Gripper - who "pays homage to musicians such as Brazil's Egberto Gismonti, Mali's Toumani Diabate and Japan’s Toru Takemitsu, uniting their work into a new form of cyclical African music."
Cape Town City Hall Grand Parade Entrance
Tues 13 and Sat 17 April at 20h00
Tickets at R50 per performance will be available at the door
Seats are limited so arrive early to avoid disappointment.
LAST WEEK FOR THE TRAIN DRIVER
The premiere run of Athol Fugard's latest play The Train Driver at the new Fugard Theatre has been extended for just one week more, ending on Sunday. The theatre is a redevelopment of an historic building, a former textile warehouse not far from the City Hall, once "frequented by generations of District Six seamstresses and tailors." A fitting place for work that, in Fugard's words, "seeks to claim people, refusing to allow them to pass on into oblivion, trying to bear witness.” About the theatre itself Fugard said, "I defy any writer to sit in the auditorium and look at that stage and not want to create work for that space – it’s thrilling”
The Fugard Theatre is in Caledon Street, Cnr of Harrington Street, District Six, Cape Town.
The Train Driver will be on Tuesday to Saturday at 19h30 and Sunday at 15h30.
Bookings www.thefugard.com 021 461 4554.
FLAMENCO TRIO AT ALLIANCE FRANCAISE
At the Alliance Francaise on Thursday there's more music, not as experimental perhaps as the City Hall concerts, but crossing borders in its own way. Saudiq Khan was raised in District Six and never lost that influence as he grew up to become a highly accomplished flamenco guitarist and composer. The Alliance advertises a "performance of speed, accuracy and high flamenco energy ....a world of deep feeling and heartfelt melodies." If you love flamenco, this is a rare chance to hear it in Cape Town.
Alliance Francaise 155 Loop St
Thursday 15 April 20h30 R50
021 4235699
BOOK LAUNCH: HOME AWAY: 24 HOURS 24 CITIES 24 WRITERS
At the Book Lounge this Thursday there's the launch of a book with an unusual and creative premise: it is a collection of 24 stories by 24 writers, each set an hour apart,each in a different city of the world. Home Away: 24 Hours 24 Cities 24 Writers "is a snapshot of South African writing today: emigrant and immigrant South Africans, living at home and away." The list of contributors is impressive - which in itself of course doesn't guarantee a good book, and I haven't seen it yet. But I think we will be assured of a very entertaining time at the launch, because seven good writers will be there to read their chapters from the book. They are Sally Partridge, Colleen Higgs, Sarah Lotz, Lauren Beukes, Liesl Jobson, Helen Moffett and Rustum Kozain plus editor Louis Greenberg .
(When I saw his name on the list, I looked for a poem by Rustum Kozain which I've added as a post-script - I heard him read it at the Book Fair years ago, and I've found it unforgettable.)
Book Lounge Thursday 15 17h30 for 18h00 RSVP to either booklounge@gmail.com or to 021 462 2425
CAPE TOWN POSTCARDS FROM CIRCA 1908
Post-script: A poem by Rustum Kozain from the book This Carting Life
Kingdom of Rain
from these I am growing no nearer
to what secret eluded the children
Derek Walcott, ‘Sainte Lucie’
Somewhere in some dark decade
stands my father without work,
unknown to me and my brother
deep in the Paarl winter and a school holiday.
As the temperature drops, he,
my father, fixes a thermos of coffee,
buys some meat pies and we chug
up Du Toit’s Kloof Pass in his old 57 Ford,
where he wills the mountain – under cold cloud,
tan and blue rockface bright and wet with rain –
he wills these to open and let his children in,
even as he apologises –
my strict and angry fearsome father –
even as he apologises for his existence
then and there his whereabouts declared
to the warden or ranger in government
issue, ever-present around the next turn
or lazing in a jeep in the next lay-by:
“No sir, just driving. Yes, sir, my car.”
At the highest point of the pass
we stop to eat, and he, my father,
this strict and angry, fearsome father,
my father whom I love and his dark face,
he pries open a universe that strangely
he makes ours, that is no longer mine:
a wily old grey baboon, well-hid
against salt-and-pepper rock, eyeing us;
some impossibly magnificent bird of prey
rarely seen, racing to its nest as the weather turns.
And we are up there close I think
to my father’s God, the wind howling
and cloud rushing over us, awed
and small in that big car swaying in the gale.
Silence. A sudden still point
as the universe pauses, inhales
and gathers its grace.
Then, the silent, feather-like fall
of snowflakes as to us it grants
a brief bright kingdom
unseen by the ranger. And for some minutes
a car with three stunned occupants
rests on a mountain top outside the fast
ever-darkening turn of our growing up;
too brief to light the dark years
when I would learn:
how the bright, clear haunts of crab and trout
where we swim in summer
now in winter a brown rage over rock;
how mountain and pine and fynbos
or the mouse-drawn falcon of my veld;
the one last, mustard-dry koekemakranka
of summer that my father tosses through the air
to hit the ground and puff like a smoke bomb;
and once, also in summer somewhere,
a loquacious piet-my-vrou;
or the miraculous whirligig of waterhondjies
streaking across a tea-coloured pool
cradled by tan rock and fern-green fern;
my first and only owl,
large and mysterious
in a deep stand of pine,
big owl we never knew were there
until you swooped away, stirred by our voices;
how I too would be woken and learn
that this tree and bird, this world
the earth and this child’s home
already fell beyond his possessives.
And how, once north through the dry
Bushmanland with its black rock,
over a rise in the road, the sudden green
like the strange and familiar sibilants
in Keimoes and Kakamas.
And the rush of the guttural was the water
over rock at Augrabies.
The Garieb over rock at Augrabies,
at Augrabies where the boom swings down,
the gate-watch tight-lipped as a sermon:
“Die Kleurlingkant is vol”
as he waves through a car filled
with bronzed impatient white youth
laughing at us, at my father, my father
my silent father in whom a gaze grows distant
and the child who learns this pain past metaphor.
How like a baboon law and state
just turned its fuck-you arse on us
and ambled off.
