kagablog

ANOTHER PLAY

Ampleby wrote his fifth ‘play’ called the ‘Come Uppance of Punch’. This was a solo play, and it looked at how history repeats itself in different guises. He contacted the manufacturers of Red Bull energy drink giving them a brief history of his discovery of this image, his performance endeavours, plus photographs. He had video footage if further proof was required. He requested sponsorship (R5000 - a fortune to him, nothing to them) to enable him to take his latest play to the Grahamstown Festival, seeing as he had already prepared the ground for them in extensive free advertising over the last twelve years, and had quite firmly ingrained the image of the Red Bull in so many people’s minds. They responded by sending him three cans of his own blood, telling him that his play was not the type of event with which they were interested in being associated. This was identical to the stock response he had been given when his paintings were rejected by the Market Theatre: “This is not the type of work that the Market Theatre likes to exhibit.” 1983 and 1995. Pre and post Apartheid - the response had been exactly the same - yet he had submitted completely different work! Culturally, it seemed, everything was being left to its own old devices. The Navy, Army, Post Office, Judiciary, Education, could all undergo transformation, but culture….oh….oh…culture, culture could be left to its own devices! This type of bland response mechanism that is so prevalent within the establishment - within the corporate world - is exactly the type of backward thinking response mechanism that goads further endeavours, and proves how utterly vampiric they really are. It proves they can only make money out of other peoples’ energy because anybody producing that type of understanding cannot possibly have a creative fibre anywhere in their bodies. He thus declared that: anyone drinking Red Bull drank his BLOOD.
Red Bull was reeked and ranked with his blood. He had suffered, and the pain of that suffering was never more encapsulated in the image of the Red Bull. It had bled him, and he was bleeding still. It was through the Red Bull that he had let his blood. This bloodletting. This was not a rational issue.

“LOOK AT THAT THEN AND NOW I AM”

The swing to the Berea Inn kick started the gradual four year final transformation of Ampleby Trump. He noticed one day, not any day of any particular note, that he was becoming invisible. He held up his hand to the light, and he could see right through it. This strange and gradual transformation was the complete and inevitable final stage in his arduous, phenomenal and enlightening metamorphosis. He advertised to start a new alternative venture, and nobody came! He no longer existed in any physical sense. Once he had given up djing, he was no longer in existence. He learnt that what was, had nothing to do with what is. At the same time he felt strangely free. He had given it his best shot, given it everything that he had, held nothing back. Doing thus had released him. He let the entire burden of what he had been carrying slip away from him. He lightened. He no longer held the responsibility of nurturing. As he transformed, so he became more transparent. As he became more transparent, the horizons broadened, the landscape deepened. Durban became larger. He could be seen in different places simultaneously: in a new club, on television, in a cutting edge dance performance, at a painting exhibition, in a fashion show, in a new dance group, in the streets, on a bicycle. The more he was denied, the more rampant he became. He had multiplied into a thousand different facets and was reproducing ever more - a non-pathogenic virus undergoing replication, no longer stoppable, sustained by an autotrophic energy that required no host, no knowable sustenance, no light, no dark, no water: the ether of life itself. Thus it was that he became rooted in every single creative phenomenon across the country. It was 1996.