kagablog

Straight from its world premiere at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (KKNK) in Oudtshoorn, the cutting-edge hiphopera Afrikaaps is coming to the Baxter Theatre. It will be playing from 7 to 23 April at 20:00 nightly.

Director, Catherine Henegan, has assembled a formidable ensemble of young guns and an equally impressive creative team to help trace the origins of Afrikaans all the way back to the 1600s and follow its evolution through to the present day.

The line-up features hip-hop poet, performer and musician, Jitsvinger; composer, pianist and jazz prodigy, Kyle Shepherd; singer and poet, Blaq Pearl; hip-hop artist and activist, Emile Jansen; bassist and musician, Shane Cooper; singer, actor and dancer, Moenier Adams; rapper and break-dancer, Bliksemstraal; and poet and storyteller, Jethro Louw of the Khoi Khonnexion.

Set in a dynamic digital landscape, the ensemble, Die Argitekbekke, represents an eclectic fusion of musical genres. In true hip-hop mode this musical theatre piece employs glitches; scratches; beats; and rhymes to traverse time, while also referencing the multiplicity of traditional Cape styles like Ghoema and Kaapse Klopse.

South African-born Henegan once again teams up with film maker; director; poet; novelist; musician; and blogger, Aryan Kaganof, who takes on the role of dramaturg for this production. The two last worked together in South Africa on The Shooting Gallery, which was presented at The Market Theatre and at the National Arts Festival, Grahamstown. Documentary film maker, Dylan Valley, is responsible for the video and for documenting the process with lighting by top international lighting designer, Jantje Geldof.

Afrikaaps is an international collaboration between the Baxter Theatre Centre and The Glasshouse Theatre Collective in Amsterdam, in association with ABSA KKNK, with additional support from the Performing Arts Fund of Netherlands; City of Amsterdam; and Theatre Institute of the Netherlands.

Henegan is Co-founder of The Glasshouse, a multi-disciplinary theatre collective based in Amsterdam. She made her debut as a director in South Africa in 2006 with the controversial media performance of The Shooting Gallery about a war photographer with a moral dilemma.

“With this collaboration I am excited to be bringing together artists from different disciplines made up of musicians; performers; and film makers for this theatrical event,” says Henegan.

This theatre production is part of a bigger movement of efforts to reclaim the Afrikaans language for all who speak it. There is a side to the language - the Creole birth of the language - that has been overlooked in South Africa’s collective consciousness. The role of indigenous cultures and the slave population in forging the language has generally been excluded from the history books. The Afrikaans hip-hop movement in the Cape, through voices like Jitsvinger; Blaq Pearl; and Emile Jansen, is fueled by celebrating and reclaiming indigenous cultural heritage, and defining and re-defining who the Afrikaners of the 21st century are.

The makers of Afrikaaps set out on a mission of investigation and redefinition combining storytelling; poetry; music; and video to trace the evolution and roots of Afrikaans. As Dylan Valley, who is making the video component of the production, has pointed out, “We need to recognise Afrikaans as part of the heritage of all South Africans, and not only of one particular racial group. Together we can make Afrikaans a language of liberation! ”

Afrikaaps runs at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival from 1 to 4 April and then transfers to the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town for a short season from 7 to 23 April at 20:00 nightly. Booking is through Computicket on 083 915 8000; online at www.computicket.co.za; or at any Shoprite Checkers outlet countrywide.

this article first appeared on mediaupdate.co.za

In 1997 UNESCO included in its Memory of the World Register an archive best known as the Bleek Collection and described thusly:

The Bleek Collection consists of papers of Dr W.H.I. Bleek (1827-1875), his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd (1834-1914), his daughter Dorothea Bleek (1873-1948) and G.W. Stow (1822-1882) relating to their researches into the San (Bushman) language and folklore, as well as albums of photographs. Bleek developed a phonetic script for transcribing the characteristic clicks and sounds of the !Xam language which is used by linguists to this day. Although some of the material was published by Lucy Lloyd and Dorothea Bleek, a great deal remains unpublished. The material provides an invaluable and unique insight into the language, life, religion, mythology, folklore and stories of this late Stone Age people.1

The Bleek Collection does indeed offer many invaluable lessons, chief among them being how Western constructions of modernity are imbedded in tropes of prehistory and indigeneity and wedded to proclamations of science and salvage. Robert Gordon has suggested the archive be seen in the context of South Africa’s “incipient scientific nationalism.”2 The Bleek Collection was recently published in a lavish volume and accompanying CD ROM, edited by scholar and artist Pippa Skotnes. This publication, Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek (2007), continues Skotnes’s scholarly and artistic inquiry into the lives of the Lloyd and Bleek family and their informants and was preceded by Skotnes’s Sound of the Thinking Strings (1991) and the controversial exhibition (with catalogue) Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushman (1996). Skotnes’s latest exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Unconquerable Spirit: George Stow’s History Paintings of the San, launched in November 2008 at Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town, centers on Lucy Lloyd and the geologist/ethnographer George Stow in connection to Stow’s rock painting studies. Sustained and legitimized by exhibitions, publications, and national museums, universities, and archives, these projects have provided privileged reinscriptions of archival materials gathered during an era of cultural plunder of South Africa’s indigenous heritage by colonial forces. Skotnes’s scholarly and artistic contributions to contemporary conceptualizations of South Africa’s earliest inhabitants are immensely valuable. Her appropriation of San heritage is deeply inflected by her scholarship on the San and most particularly Bleek, Lloyd, and Stow’s interpolations of the San and early rock art painting. Her publications and exhibitions offer rich and at times competing layers of analyses that seem to position her as a keen, insightful and detached observer-scholar and then again as a romanticizing dramaturgist and scenographer. To this end, there are parallels with the endeavors of Bleek and Lloyd and renewed courtship with the constructions of Western modernity through and against African indigeneity.

Can artistic “appropriations” of indigenous
cultural forms deconstruct or at the very least
interrogate the constructed modernities imposed
upon the term “indigenous”? This essay considers
a single artist’s — Garth Erasmus — relationship
to contemporary conceptions of indigeneity in
South Africa (Figure 1). It is guided by two key
questions: How are contemporary understandings
and perceptions of indigeneity bound up in
the “what” and the “when” of South African
modernity; and Is indigeneity a trope of modernity,
and if so, whose modernity? Historicizing the
naming and appropriation of indigenous cultures
in South Africa offers critical insight into the
larger interrogation of African modernity. Two
observations are set forth herein; firstly, that in
terms of “indigenous,” modernity and prehistory
(or the premodern) are codependent; and second,
that those artists who appropriate indigenous
cultures through a lens of “critical extinction”
risk reproducing a paradigm of Eurocentric
modernity.
While South Africa is the self-proclaimed
cradle of humankind,3 the indigenous people of
southern Africa have long been imagined as living
examples of prehistory.4 The continued display of
the dioramas of non-Eurocentric
South African tribal [sic] groups that include
life casts situated in historicized environments at
the Iziko South African Museum perpetuates this
view.
The prehistory has and continues to play a
seminal role in South African national identity.5
Indeed, in South Africa, constructions of
modernity are contingent upon prehistory
narratives as much as they are on the premodern.
According to Robert Gordon, “While [South
Africa’s first peoples] have been socially marginal,
symbolically they were [and are] central to a
number of different ideological constellations.”6
In the European “age of discovery,” assumed links
between “modern savages” and stone-age peoples
of Europe were common. “Modern savages” were
“found” at the “uttermost ends of the earth” and
the South African Cape represented just such a
place.7 Voyages to these distant parts represented
a kind of time travel for which Europeans “made
the crucial substitution of space for time.”8
But for European settlers living in proximity
to the indigenous peoples of South Africa, the
mythologized temporal distance became a critical
replacement for spatial distancing. European
modernity was produced by the collapse and
distortion of time such that simultaneous presents
were rendered chronologically distant and through
such reductive exercises, a process of “othering”
was begun.
South Africa’s earliest inhabitants are
commonly called the Khoikhoi (KhoiKhoi) and the
San, the former cast as pastoralists and the latter
as hunter-gathers. Although movement among
the early inhabitants and between these modes
of living took place, modernist narratives created
separate myths and derogatory names — the
Hottentots and the Bushmen — for the Khoi
and the San, respectively.9 Distinguishing huntergatherers
from pastoralists served the ideological,
unilinear trajectory of cultural evolution, and
secured the San’s place as first primitives. The
clicks that dominate the languages spoken by
the Khoi and the San were the subject of early
European derogation and marked them as a
lesser race, between human and beast.10 European
illustrations of Cape inhabitants rendered them
variously as savage, wild, exotic, and indolent.11
Khoisan is a blended term that, in its contemporary
use, acknowledges the mutual fates of the Khoi
and San peoples of South Africa, displaced and
greatly decimated by European colonization.
As with “Bushmen,” revived popular and civic
usage has not dispelled debates about proper
nomenclature and land right claims, nor eased, in
Skotnes’ words, the “tangled lines of inheritance
that characterize Khoisan identity today.”12
Artist and San scholar Pippa Skotnes suggests
that, “The final dispossession of the Khoisan
came with their assimilation into Afrikaner life
and their classification along with others of (as
the state perceived it) ‘mixed blood’ as ‘Cape
Coloured.’”13
The dispossession of these indigenous
peoples by European settlers suggests that the
Khoisan problematic is not easily positioned under
the themes of Africa and modernity although
both are critically present. Notwithstanding
their long history of social, political, and cultural
engagement with Bantu peoples, the indigenous
peoples of southern Africa are and have been
repeatedly situated apart from black Africans
for ideological, economic and political gain .14
The indigenous people are treated very much
like the “discovered” hominid fossils used to
support claims that South Africa is the “cradle
of humankind.” They are located within “Africa”
but as relics of “prehistory” are considered not
per se “African” i.e. “black African.” The issue in
question here is specifically the African identity
and modernity of white South Africans, which
was contemporaneous yet deemed superior rather
than parallel to other modernities within the same
location.15 To quote one noted South African
archaeologist, “All people who populate the world
today are descended from people who originated
in Africa […] The San or ‘Bushmen’ of southern
Africa are descended from those individuals who
stayed at home and did not emigrate to seek their
fortunes elsewhere.”16
South African archeological studies long
served two mythic constructs. First, that the
prehistory evident in southern Africa could be
sequenced back to Europe and second, that South
Africa’s prehistory was indelibly linked to the San,
a modern/contemporary ethnically designated
group who were seen as living relics of southern
Africa’s prehistory.17 As archaeologist Nick
Shepherd poignantly argued, colonial archeology
was practiced “without knowing or wanting
to know anything about African people, per
se — least of all the African present — [and] doing
archeology involved looking through a present
landscape […] to find the traces of an imagined
past lying below.”18
Artistically speaking, South African-born
Walter Battiss (1906-1982) is a good example of
this trajectory. Acknowledged today for looking
to South African rock art for source material at
a time when most white artists were looking to
Europe for inspiration, Battiss claimed to not
understand the black man and to find in Bushmen
a vestigial Adam.19
I was trying to find out what came
before the Europeans came, take what I
could from it, change it and build on it.
This was something that was completely
misunderstood. People thought that all
I was doing was imitating the Bushman
or just extending Bushman art or
prehistoric art, but that is not what I
was getting at at all. I think it is really
necessary to make it quite clear now
that what I had recognized was that
in all of us there is still some aspect
of primitivism — the vestigial Adam.
There is still some of the primitive
man in all of us, and we as Europeans
were perfectly justified in taking what
we wanted from our ancestors, and I
looked upon the Bushman as rather a
minor form of this big background,
because the white people had ancestors
who had lived in caves, and [there are]
white people within civilization living
primitive and simple lives today and they
still retain something of that outlook
which the artist admires. I am going into
some detail about this but I think there
is a complete misunderstanding in South
Africa over what a South African artist
should use. I think he should use what is
about him, what he finds there, that he
should use it as a European.20
South African discourses on indigenous
culture that center temporal distance are laden
with modernist conceptions of extinction and
acculturation and often preclude contemporary
exigencies. However, artist Garth Erasmus, whose
performance, soundscapes, and visual art have for
some years focused on South African indigenous
history and culture, revises an interest in
indigenous narratives in South Africa that presents
a dialectical challenge to such assumptions (Figure
2). Erasmus’ work represents an inversion or
refutation of modernity’s constructed relationship
to a “primitive” indigenous past. His concept of
the indigenous is neither temporally nor spatially
distant; rather it suggests that the social temporality
that matters most is the present condition.
In many ways, South Africa’s present is
symbolically conditioned by the success of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a
comprehensive process of social healing relative
to apartheid-era atrocities. Yet South African

http://www.theglasshouse.nu/actueel/

By Atiyyah Khan

Afrikaans will be turned on its head, spun around rapidly and set free in Afrikaaps, which opens at the Baxter Theatre next month.

It’s hip, it’s fresh and it’s sinking its teeth into the roots of Cape Town.

The production boldly reclaims the language of Afrikaans for all those who speak it, by linking threads of history and re-rooting its origins in the Cape to tell a story that is generally unknown.

If you know anything about multi-instrumentalist and composer Kyle Shepherd and poet and musician Jitsvinger (Quintin Goliath), it will then not come as a complete shock that they’re collaborating on a project.

What Shepherd does through music, Jitsvinger achieves with crafted words.

The talented youths met last year through a series of events that would eventually lead them to Amsterdam, Holland, under the facilitation of Catherine Henegan, of The Glasshouse Theatre Collective. Initially a raw experimental collaboration, this was the birthing of Afrikaaps. Henegan saw merit in bringing the two artists together in a musical and poetic collaboration. After obtaining funding, she sought out South African co-production partners for support.

Rehearsals are under way at the Baxter under the direction of Henegan, with the backing of a powerhouse team that’s grown from just the initial two and is now a multi-talented collective that stands at the very cusp of edgy and outspoken.

It features legendary hip hop activist and b-boy Emile Jansen, bassist and electronic producer Shane Cooper, B-boy and rapper Bliksemstraal, poet Jethro Louw of Khoi Khonnexion, singer and actor Moenier Adams and singer and poet Blaq Pearl. Collectively they are Die Argitekbekke.

“Rehearsals” is really a loose term for an explosion of brainstorming in an intense creative process. The team has a natural synergy that symbiotically feeds off each other’s creativity. It’s a rapport of minds that functions as one organism.

Afrikaaps unfolds in a digital landscape of storytelling, poetry, video and music that ranges from hip-hop beats to Ghoema and Kaapse Klopse.

Dylan Valley is responsible for capturing the process for a documentary and using film footage during the actual production. Writer and film-maker Aryan Kaganof is on board as dramaturg for the production.

Shepherd, who was recently nominated for two South African Music Awards (Samas) - Newcomer of the Year and Best Traditional Jazz Album - is the production’s musical director.

At 22, he is the youngest musician to win the Sama’s Traditional Jazz category, of which he modestly says: “We accept acknowledgement for our work.”
Click here!

Jitsvinger speaks volumes about his history and is masterful in his inventive use of Afrikaans, which he first coined as “Afrikaaps”.

He says: “There was a longing for all of us to meet through some divine intervention. When I first heard Kyle’s music, I knew what I was listening to. It felt in some way that what we were doing was related.”

For Jitsvinger and Shepherd, Afrikaaps is the first time they’re engaged so completely on a major theatrical sphere.

Jitsvinger says: “I always wanted to do this. My thinking is, don’t be stuck to only one dynamic of yourself; be the character you feel speaks the truest according to the message you want to convey. We’re like rubber at the moment; we can break through our moulds.”

A little known fact is that Shepherd was quite involved in theatre at school, which indirectly assists with his role as musical director.

He explains: “I’ve also been a band leader, so it’s not that far off. Of course, theatre is a different kind of discipline; not only am I the musical director, but also writing the musical script, so it’s double the responsibility and calls for double the focus.”

As a team, they are reclaiming what was theirs, instilling pride into the Afrikaans-speaking community by looking at the original architects of Afrikaans since the 1600s and getting behind the misrepresentation of stereotypes that the media has perpetuated.

It’s not really the “how” of Afrikaaps that is important to them, but rather the “why”.

“It’s important because the people who speak the language feel like they don’t own it. On the flipside, the ones who claim it aren’t the ones who birthed it. So it’s like retelling the history of Afrikaans,” says Jitsvinger.

Shepherd adds: “Many people don’t know this story and it is long overdue. We’re really setting the language free so that people can take from it what they need. The language belongs to all who speak it.”

He continues: “The language in which you communicate with people is really the first step in building self-identity and self-awareness, so we’re emancipating it to everyone who speaks it.”

Other than Afrikaaps, Jitsvinger plans to release two albums this year, while Shepherd plans to release a live trio album next month, which will be followed by a tour in Europe in June and a release of a second studio album in August.

# Afrikaaps premieres at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival in Oudtshoorn from April 1 to 4. See www.kknk.co.za. It runs at the Baxter Theatre from April 6 to 27 at 8pm. R50 to R120 at Computicket: 083 915 8000.

this article first appeared on tonight.co.za

JETHRO is thin, wears short dreadlocks and torn clothing, and is missing his top front teeth. The police assume he is a two bit felon and constantly harass him.

In fact Jethro is a poet and a former Western Province athlete. He writes and performs in English and Afrikaans. For the last few years he has been performing both solo and as part of the Khoi Khollektif. The Khollektif is a group of musicians and poets gathered under their Khoisan heritage and desire to rewrite the disturbed representation of the Bushmen people and their culture. The Khollektif includes Garth Erasmus, Loit Sôls, Leslie Javan and Monica Botha.

Jethro has achieved high acclaim in Cape Town, recording and releasing as part of the Wondergigs live recording series in 2002, featuring on various Cape Town Festival stages and at poetry events such as Urban Voices. He is regularly invited by government to perform at events relating to arts, culture and language - he was a feature of the 2002 World Trade Summit in Johannesburg. During the era of the Monday night poetry sessions – at Café Camissa and then at Papa’s – Jethro established himself as one of the city’s most compelling voices. His words follow in the tradition of social critique offered by griots like Bob Marley and Linton Kwesi Johnson.

Jethro loves to walk. One year he walked from Cape Town to Grahamstown to perform on the street and sell self-produced copies of his poetry. He regularly walks home to Kalkfontein from city a distance of some 35 minutes by car from the City. The walking, he says, provides good time to think and compose poetry.

jethro’s webpage is here

Laetitia Pople

Kaapstad

’n Eietydse Kaapse hiphopera wat die storie van Afrikaans in die 1600’s gaan haal, ’n multidissiplinêre gemeenskaps­opera wat in taxi’s afspeel en geskep is deur 20 jong studente van Soweto, asook gereelde besoeke van Nederland se voorste klassiekemusici, jazzers en teaterlui om hul vaardighede hier in te ploeg, is die jongste wisselwerking tussen Suid-Afrika en Nederland.

Die omvangryke projek staan as Interaksie SA-NL bekend en het eintlik informeel verlede jaar al begin met die sterk Nederlandse betrokkenheid by die KKNK. Dit behels benewens die gereelde besoek van Nederlandse musiek-, dans- en teatergroepe aan Suid-Afrika ook ’n uitgebreide program van slypskole, lesings en meesterklasse deur Nederlandse kunstenaars. Die kunstenaars gaan met jong Suid-Afrikaanse talent werk, maar ook met Suid-Afrika se voorste kunstenaars en geselskappe om grensverskuiwende produksies die lig te laat sien.

Vennote sluit onder meer in die Melody-musieksentrum in Soweto, Mike van Graan, die Ipelegeng-gemeenskapsentrum in Soweto, die Markteater en die Kaapse Filharmoniese Orkes.

Die doel van die projek is die daarstelling van innoverende teater-, dans- en musikale produksies wat deur die Suid-Afrikaanse kultuur geïnspireer is.

Die produksies sal op verskeie feeste, sale en teaters in Suid-Afrika opgevoer word, waaronder op Infecting the City, KKNK, die Nasionale Kunstefees in Grahamstad, opvoerings in die Baxter-teater, die Markteater in ­Johannesburg, die Voorkamerfees in Darling en die oppikoppi-fees.

* Die eerste groot ko-produksie is die hiphopera Afrikaaps wat
van 1 tot 4 April op die KKNK en van 7 tot 25 April in die
Baxter-teater in Kaapstad opgevoer word.

Die produksie, wat die wortels van Afrikaans naspeur, smee die talente van die hiphop-digter en kunstenaar Jitsvinger, die digter Blaq Pearl en die jazzpianis Kyle Sheperd saam. Dit sal afspeel in ’n digitale landskap en die musiekstyle en genres sal oorkruis. Benewens hiphop sal Kaapse style soos ghoema en die musiek van die Kaapse Klopse ook gehoor word.

Die dramaturg is Aryan Kaganof en die regisseur is Catherine Henegan, medestigter van The Glasshouse in Amsterdam.

first published on m.24.com

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR YOUTH BY BUYING TICKETS FOR THEM TO ATTEND BLACK NOISE 22ND ANNIVERSARY AT THE BAXTER THEATRE. ALL FUNDS WILL FUND FREE ONGOING HEAL THE HOOD HIP HOP WORKSHOPS IN THEIR COMMUNITIES.

LINK TO BUY TICKET:- http://www.computicket.com/web/event/black_noise_22nd_anniversary/99395581/0/7310236

OR MAKE A CONTRIBUTION TTHROUGH PAYPAL www.healthehood.org top left of home page - link here

COST:- R 50= ± $7.14 per ticket

Hello

I am appealing to the local and international community to assist us with bringing more young people from the Cape Flats to experience different events. Climbing Table Mountain, Bus trips to each others communities to break the legacy of Apartheid of forced removals and adding the force needed to bring people back together, Badilisha Poetry, C.A.R.A and Anton Fransch Memorial Concerts, Cape Flats Uprising, Battle of the Year Africa, funding kids school funds at Sid G Rule and Lavender Hill High and visiting District Six Museum.

Last year people bought tickets and sponsored transport from the Cape Town, USA, Germany and Australia. Thuis event forms part of Its part of Project Breaking that fights Xenophobia or Afrophobia. By buying youth tickets you will also expose them to each other in new surroundings and change the view they have of themselves.

Thanks to you, we hosted trips:-

Some of last years kids benefiting from tickets

http://www.healthehood.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=42&Itemid=53

Press Release

Black Noise Celebrates its 22nd Anniversary at the Baxter

Venue:- Baxter Theatre Concert Hall

Date:- 13th February 2010

Time:- 17H00 - 20H00 Hip Hop Dance Battles

20H00 - 23H00 Concert

Performances:- Vicky Sampson, Ernestine Deane, Emile YX?, DJ Angelo, Heal the Hood Junior B-boy Class from Eastridge Mitchells Plain and Black Noise Hip Hop Group.

Entry Fee:- R50 http://www.computicket.com/web/event/black_noise_22nd_anniversary/99395581/0/7310236

or call 021 7060481

Description:-

The dance battles will showcase breakdancer/ b-boy crews Knock-out battles, krumpers, poppers and new skool Hip Hop shows from the Cape Flats. Many of these groups have been influenced by Black Noise over the years. This event will launch a 10 leg Cape Flats Uprising Hip Hop Tour throughout the Western Cape of which all proceeds will go to the schools, Hip Hop Artists and Heal the Hood Project. Come support this historic event and legendary hip hop legacy of the Western Cape.