By Phumlani Saul
The first collection of shows on the 2021 National Arts Festival Experience programme has been announced. The hybrid festival sees the National Arts Festival return to live stages in Makhanda from 8-18 July, and for the first time in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Gqeberha and Durban ahead of the Eastern Cape event with a series of shows called Standard Bank Presents, in theatres from 17 June-4 July. The National Arts Festival Online programme will also unfold through the month of July on the Festival’s website. The Festival Experience features new elements such as Standard Bank Presents, as well as audience favourites such as the Standard Bank Jazz Festival and the Fringe.
Working within the COVID-19 regulations and responding to what audiences and artists need, the Festival has spread its programme across three platforms to create enabling spaces that best accommodate and interpret the work being made in South Africa right now. As such, it is a study of work migrating, shifting and returning across mediums, platforms, time and space as the arts strives to re-establish and express itself after a long period of forced hibernation.
Says National Arts Festival’s Artistic Director, Rucera Seethal, “The Festival has, this year, emerged as a time capsule of the artmaking coming from the past year and our current predicament. Opportunities to create and present have notably reduced, however artists have still made work, in new formats and using new methods. In 2021, the Festival has taken on the challenge of considering how to curate live experiences for audiences in Makhanda and various cities. There is a sense of works in transformation, works crossing disciplinary boundaries, works insisting on new relationships with space, distance and audience. As much as, thematically, artists are reflecting on this current disorientating moment, curatorially the Festival has sought to present works which offer solace to audiences – from stillness to humour to healing
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