kagablog

July 11, 2006 Edition 1

Theresa Smith

Not everyone in the audience awaiting the start of the re-imaging Mozart programme at the National Arts Festival knew what Aryan Kaganof was about to do.

Certainly, the chap next to me didn’t know what to make of this man in the black hat who whipped out his cellphone and started walking (in slow motion) towards composer Michael Blake, who was playing Mozart’s Fantasia K475.

As he walked towards Blake, the sound he was receiving on his cell- phone was being sent to another cellphone which was suspended in front of a microphone.

Depending on where he directed his cellphone - into the body of the piano, at Blake or at the speakers - he created feedback, loops, tinny sounds and at one stage it even sounded like Blake was playing at the bottom of the ocean.

Weird as it may have seemed, it was still much more pleasant than the multimedia programme which followed (two harpsichords and two pianos), with each artist literally doing their own thing. If they’d all been playing together it could’ve still made a bit more sense than the four of them just banging away.

Multimedia was a big theme at this year’s festival and some productions were better at it than others.

Kaganof was also involved in Catherine Henegan’s The Shooting Gallery. Inspired greatly by the book The Bang Bang Club by Joao Silva and Greg Marinovich, it used plenty of news images of war, famine and inhumanity projected onto a large screen.

The theatrical production actually incorporated real-time Internet pictures and news and after about 10 minutes of watching a sub-editor laying out a newspaper page, Kaganof is hoisted, upside down, in front of the huge screen.

The music becomes even more frenetic, the pictures even more brutal and as it all becomes a bit much, he starts spouting poetry.

Then he gets lowered, staggers around the screen in a seriously angst-ridden performance and, just before it becomes too much, the cellphone rings and he starts a conversation with his mother.

Photo-journalists do lead a seriously messed-up life, trying to balance the “normalcy” of family life with the hectic images they are called on to record. But there was too much (admittedly, startling and amazing) imagery and not enough drama to get the message across. Unless you’re in the industry, in which case you start picking on the sub’s layout methods.

Though he calls himself a technophobe, Kaganof is not above using technology to get the image he wants. He is, after all, the first person to shoot a feature film using just a cellphone camera.

The teaser trailer of SMS Sugar man was screened and suggests a great B-grade adventure flick, in the best sense of the term.

While his Giant Steps documentary about Dashiki poet Lefifi Tladi, is well constructed with excellent editing and absorbing subject matter his new one, Michael Blake Untitled wasn’t half as absorbing.

this article originally appeared in the star, 11 july 2006