kagablog

photo: cloete breytenbach

photo: cloete breytenbach

photo: cloete breytenbach

photo: cloete breytenbach

photo: cloete breytenbach

photo: cloete breytenbach

When the archive of the Eoan Group became available for scholarly research at the Documentation Centre for Music at the University of Stellenbosch in 2008, my surprise was twofold; the archive contained exceptionally rich material and these documents were virtually untouched. As if forgotten, the documents had been stowed away underneath the orchestra pit in the auditorium of the Joseph Stone Theatre in Athlone since the group moved there in 1969; almost forty years. This, despite the fact that the Eoan Group to this day continued its cultural activities in that building and that many of those who frequented the Joseph Stone Theatre during these years were familiar with the illustrious past this organization has had. The same curious memory laps occurs on the organization’s website: under its history section there is no mention what so ever that Eoan ever performed opera. Last year the organization celebrated its 75th anniversary and although some attempts have been made to commemorate their past, these occasions have mostly happened within the circle of Eoan Groupers. Very little attention has been given in the public domain to the group, its past or its legacy. As I will illustrate in today’s paper, the conscious (or maybe unconscious) stowing away of Eoan’s extraordinary history, is part and parcel of the exile that this organization has experienced thus far.

Let’s go back in time to around 1950. At this point in the history of opera in South Africa, local opera production could be described as an inconsistent flow of productions by various amateur bodies that came and went in the main centres of the country. All of them were following their own cultural or political agenda, most of them aspired to national status and all of them functioned without financial support from the state. Some of these organizations were short lived and others experienced more productive periods. Due to time constraints of today’s paper, I cannot venture into more detail about these organizations, so I will suffice by mentioning the main ones: the National Opera Company, the National Opera Society, the National Theatre Organization, the National Opera Association of South Africa, Die Operavereniging van Suid-Afrika, the South African Opera Federation as well as Die Opera-organisasie van Suid-Afrika. In addition, in 1952 Erik Chisholm, Dean of the College of Music at the UCT, started the University of Cape Town Opera School. Managers, singers and audience support for these organizations stemmed of course predominantly from the white population in the country.

Imagine the surprise to all and sundry when in March 1956 the Eoan Group, a cultural organization based in District Six, (and this means a group of people who predominantly came from a disadvantaged background and who were not white), appeared on the opera scene with nine full length productions of Verdi’s La Traviata, sung in Italian. The event proved to be most successful: within the first day of booking all tickets for the first performance were sold out (approximately 1000 seats). Eight more performances followed before the end of that month, including a special performance of La Traviata held for government dignitaries. The reviews were overwhelming and Eoan seemed to have taken the city by storm. Well known critic Charlie Weich of Die Burger wrote that, had he not seen with his own eyes what a Coloured Opera company had achieved on the night of 10 March 1956 in the City Hall, he would not have believed it. The voices of May Abrahamse and Lionel Fourie and the décor and costumes were specially mentioned as outstanding. Behind the scenes, the production was driven by local Italians: the opera was produced by Alessandro Rota and Joseph Manca conducted the all white Cape Town Municipal Orchestra.

The opera production was just one part of an Arts Festival that included a children’s version of the Mikado, the South African premiere of the musical comedy Zip goes a Million, a performance of Handel’s Elijah, performances of the play Johnny Belinda and many other cultural activities such as Greek and classical ballet shows and flower exhibitions. The festival’s productions were spread over six month and came to a close in August 1956. The entire festival was held in the Cape Town City Hall, the only venue where Eoan was allowed to perform before racially mixed audiences, although entrances, seats and amenities for White and coloured were kept separate.

Who was this group and how did they manage these extraordinary cultural achievements? The Eoan Group was founded by Helen Southern-Holt in 1933 as a cultural and welfare organization in the former so-called Coloured suburb of District Six. Southern-Holt hailed from the UK and motivated her reasons for launching the group as follows: ‘My first desire in giving help to the Coloured community was to start classes for clear, articulate speech. Having had to engage Coloured workers as well as European, I knew from experience that the mass of Coloured boys and girls entering the labour market were ill-equipped, and had not the power of the spoken word to aid them’. Speech classes soon turned into drama classes; physical education and ballet classes were added shortly after and in 1944 Southern-Holt invited Joseph Manca, an accountant from Italian descent with a passion for opera, to conduct the small choir. In the course of the following 13 years, Joseph Manca developed the small choir into an amateur opera company.

During the twenty years following the 1956 Arts Festival, Eoan not only annually presented Cape Town with Italian opera, they also toured the country twice, launched a second arts festival in 1962, premiered South Africa’s first indigenous ballet (The Square by Stanley Glasser) and had the opportunity to tour abroad in 1975. During these years the Eoan Group was an active part of the cultural life of Cape Town and the group had a large following, comprising members of the White and Coloured population groups. Other circumstantial information bears testimony to their exceptional talent and will to overcome: Most singers (including various principal singers) could not read music and were taught their roles by rote. None of the singers were familiar with the Italian language. By 1971 the group’s repertoire included 10 operas: Verdi’s La Traviata, Rigoletto and Il Trovatore, Bizet’s Carmen, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and La Boheme, Donizetti’s L’Elisir D’Amore, Rossini’s Barber of Seville, Leoncavallo’s I Pagliaci and Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. In the late 1960s, the group also premièred the South African productions of three Hammerstein musicals: Oklahoma, South Pacific and Carmen Jones. Throughout these years, none of the singers, trainers, producers or other supporting staff were ever paid for their services. In fact, all activities took place after working hours and over weekends. All vocal training was done by two Italians who were active in the local opera scene, Alessandro Rota and Olga Magnoni, whilst Joseph Manca continued as the main organizational driving force behind the group’s activities. The group also had active ballet and drama sections throughout this time.

The notion of exile can be explored through this group on more than one level. The most obvious manifestation of exile is the physical exile from Cape Town. After the Group Areas Act was enforced, the Eoan Group moved to Athlone where they continued with opera activities well into the 1970s. District Six and Athlone are barely 20 kilometres apart, but the Group Areas Act exiled the Eoan Group from the central position it held in Cape Town’s cultural life, a role of which I could only give you a glimpse earlier in this paper. Although the Group Areas Act was enforced during the 1960s, the preceding decades were littered with legislation that restricted freedom of movement for the group. The physical exile from Cape Town was a gradual process. As early as 1947 (and this was before the National Party came to power) the group bore the brunt during a concert in Stellenbosch when the Coloured public were not allowed to enter the hall through the same entrance as whites and separate seats were allocated to them, an incident that irked political conscious individuals to such a degree that it spurred a number of newspaper articles as well as a cartoon, accusing the group of compliance with regulations that segregated races.

In Cape Town the group could only perform in the City Hall as it was the only venue that had sufficient infrastructure to cater for separate entrances, seats and toilet facilities to keep white and coloured racial groups apart and from the mid 1960s the group had to formally apply for a permit to perform in the City Hall. When District Six was zoned for White occupation in 1966, the Eoan Group had to give up their own building in Hanover Street, after which they made use of a building in Bree Street in Cape Town. Members and artists who lived in District Six were forcibly resettled in areas that were far away from Cape Town and because members were dependant on public transport, the logistics to take part in productions became more complicated.

In 1969 the group found a new home on the Cape Flats when the Joseph Stone Theatre was built in Athlone. Although this building offered more facilities than the City Hall, the white population that supported Eoan, did not travel to Athlone to see Eoan’s opera productions and the group continued to perform in the City Hall in Cape Town. However, in 1973 the City Hall was renovated and resulted in a venue that no longer offered the possibility for opera performance. Thus, Eoan lost this venue as the last physical space where their cultural contribution to the city was recognized. Their performances in town were now moved further away, to the Green and Sea Point City Hall, a venue which was even more difficult to reach by public transport. Furthermore, the ever tightening restrictions on movement for Eoan’s members is well illustrated in the stipulations of the 1974 permit the group was granted: apart from the usual regulations about separate entrances, seats and amenities, the permit also instructed that no social mingling was allowed between racial groups at their performances.

In these suffocated circumstances it is not surprising that many of Eoan’s principal artists left the country to seek job opportunities abroad. In Cape Town the state funded Cape Performing Arts Board with its multi million Rand Nico Malan Theatre, built in 1971, was a whites-only organization housed in a whites-only building, jobs for Coloured artists were not to be had. Among those who left were the tenor Joseph Gabriels (who made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1972), the sopranos Patricia van Graan and Abeeda Parker, the baritone Charles de Long, the dancer Didi Sydow and the conductor and repetiteur Gordon Jephtas who later enjoyed an illustrious career in Europe and America.

However, exile was also experienced by the Eoan Group from within. As the Group became entangled with the Apartheid government resulting from financial support they received, the group was gradually exiled from their own community. By accepting funding and complying with the terms put down by the Apartheid government, Eoan was seen to have capitulated into the Apartheid government’s policy of Coloured culture as a separate social construct, a label that for many implied servitude and a denigration of their identity. In the long run, Eoan’s liaison with Apartheid state funding proved not only dangerous, but lethal.

Even before the 1956 Arts Festival, the organization received funding from government to finance productions. The public was aware of this and several protest letters were directed against them, despite their spectacular success. Alex La Guma, chairman of the South African Coloured People’s Organisation, wrote to Eoan as follows: ‘Allow us to congratulate you on your magnificent performance of ‘La Traviata’. You have shown that, given the opportunities, Coloured people can excel in the realms of culture on par with all other peoples. However, it [has been] rumoured for some time that your group was financially supported by the government through the Coloured Affairs Department. People can conclude, therefore, that the Eoan Group supports Apartheid. In fact, the whole idea reminds one of the slave period when the farmers hired Coloureds to perform for them, their masters. Today in the 20th Century we do not recognize the white man as our master. This is the land of our birth and we demand government support for ALL cultural movements. BUT WITHOUT APARTHEID STRINGS.’

It is clear that the organization was conscious of the political compromise it made through accepting funding from the state and after the festival it refused state funding until 1965. By this time, Eoan had consolidated its reputation and just completed a second successful tour of the country. It became increasingly clear that the spiralling financial demands of an ever growing amateur opera company could not be met by ticket sales and the odd donation only. At the time the group experienced grave financial difficulties and decided to again apply for funding from the state. The wide spread implications of this step became clear over time. As political consciousness increased amongst the Coloured public, especially during the 1970s, people frowned upon Eoan, not because of opera, but because of the organization’s perceived ties with the government and at the height of the Apartheid era, few politically conscious individuals wanted to be associated with an organization that accepted money from the government. Adding to the tragedy of this situation, the amounts given to the group were pittance compared to the state funding that went into e.g. the Cape Performing Arts Board. It was barely enough to cover the logistical costs of production; no singer, dancer, actor or director was ever paid a professional fee from these state grants.

In 1977, Joseph Manca, the main driving force of the group, retired after being with the group for 34 years. His retirement triggered the structural melt down of the organization and specifically of the opera department. By 1980 Eoan’s opera activities came to a complete standstill. The organization was entangled in a maze of political difficulties and internal divisions, exacerbated by a gap between the older and younger generations. Roy Stoffels, head of the Drama Section of Eoan, compiled a report entitled ‘Reasons why the Eoan Group is no longer a viable arts project’. The report stated amongst others: ‘Eoan is synonymous with ‘Coloured Culture’; ‘Coloured Culture’ is a political offspring of the government of the day; the stigma is indelible because the present generation has been schooled into rejecting Eoan; scholars who attend Eoan, often have to keep their membership a secret for fear of victimization from fellow students and staff; businesses have failed to respond effectively to appeals for assistance for fear of damaging their own images. We are therefore wholly dependent on government subsidy.’ It is evident from the correspondence in the archive that by this time the public (read: the Coloured community) no longer supported Eoan, a situation that resulted in empty houses at performances.

To conclude, a few comments on what Eoan’s story tells us about the nature of exile. Firstly it does not necessarily imply moving to another country. Although Athlone is situated 20 kilometers from Cape Town, Eoan’s move to Athlone translated into banishment to a place cut off from the opportunity to be part of an inclusive society and isolation from the very art they were practising. Secondly, the group became alienated from the community as it was deemed politically suspect, despite being an active cultural organization in the heart of Athlone. Lastly, exile in this sped more specific case is also linked to the issue of Coloured identity. With the change to democratic rule in 1994, the Coloured community had to reposition itself in relation to the new dominant group who is now black African, and their position as a marginalized group has not changed much. Resulting from Eoan’s relatively privileged past under Apartheid rule where they e.g. enjoyed more privileges than black artists, their history in today’s political landscape is still viewed as compromised; and so Eoan represents exile from the present.

Returning to the title of this paper, ‘Opera in exile’, I admit it is misleading. It is not opera that went into exile, but the Eoan Group as a cultural body and the individuals who took part in Eoan’s productions over the years. One cannot but observe that there has been no ‘home coming’ yet for artists who once enjoyed performing opera through the Eoan Group.

Thank you
Hilde Roos
roosh@sun.ac.za

19th February 1963: University lecturer, Stanley Glasser and jazz singer, Maud Damons, on the balcony of their hotel in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. They have just arrived after fleeing from South Africa, where they were charged under the immorality act, which forbids sexual relations between members of different races. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

first published on internet here

Angelo Gobbato

When I emigrated to South Africa with my family from Milano in 1950, I was seven years old and already determined to pursue a career as an opera singer. The following account of operatic developments in my adopted country over the past fifty years is thus based on personal experience and recollections and should not be read as either an academic document or as exhaustive historical research.

Although a formal Opera House had existed in Cape Town, the oldest city in South Africa, since the late nineteenth century, by 1950 the new general post office building stood where it used to stand. Any large scale theatrical spectacles such as operas and variety shows were staged in a series of cinema houses of seating capacity around 2,500 which had been designed with sufficient stage and pit facilities to permit their performance. These theatres were given fanciful names such as ‘The Alhambra’ and ‘The Playhouse’ and they had the additional peculiarity of having been designed with stucco moldings that tried to imitate the salient features of their original namesakes. Thus when one walked into the Cape Town ‘Alhambra’ one looked up to discover the jet-blue sky and twinkling stars of an Andalusian night, with stucco cypress trees growing behind the twisting columns of the boxes which lined the walls; the Playhouse in Durban tried to recapture its English tudour counterpart with its stucco wooden beams and diamond paned leaded windows.

It was in the Cape Town Alhambra Theatre that I had my first operatic experiences, both as audience member and as performer. The performances in the early post-war years were given by touring companies of mainly Italian or Italianised singers and I recall the – to me – mythical enchantment of Rigoletto’s with Tito Gobbi, Traviata’s with Virginia Zeani and Barbiere’s with Luigi Infantino under the baton of conductors such as Francesco Patané.

Naturally there were considerable numbers of South African singers who wished to perform and develop their careers, but no they had no realistic expectation of being able to do so unless they went overseas. Many excellent private singing teachers, both from Italian and German extraction, had made their homes in South Africa, especially after World War II, and they organized staged operatic performances and operatic concerts in smaller theatrical venues around the country, often appearing themselves in the leading roles. But the major source of operatic training and operatic performances with South African casts was the Opera School at the South African college of Music at the University of Cape Town. The University of Cape Town (UCT) Opera School had been founded in the early 1920’s under the direction of the Italian tenor Giuseppe Paganelli. In the early 1950’s, under the musical direction of the Scottish composer Erik Chisholm and the stage direction of the Italian baritone Gregorio Fiasconaro, the UCT Opera company mounted regular performances of operas at UCT’s Little Theatre as well as undertaking onerous tours of South Africa and the then Rhodesia with operas such as Don Giovanni, Tosca, Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Falstaff. Although the National Party had already become the ruling party in South Africa and had begun its strict enforcement of Verwoerd’s Apartheid Policy, the University of Cape Town had firmly and publically expressed its opposition to this system and, although individual permits had to be obtained with great difficulty, singers of all races were being trained at its Opera School.

Through his links of Italian nationality and personal friendship with the voice teachers Alessandro Rota and Olga Magnoni the head of the UCT Opera School, Gregorio Fiasconaro, became the stage director for many operas which were mounted by a group of exceptionally gifted amateur singers under the musical leadership of Dr Joseph Manca. This group of singers reflected the distressing political reality of those times by being made up of members of the so-called ‘coloured community’. Under the name of The Eoan Group, these indefatigable workers mounted several seasons of opera at the Cape Town City Hall – a venue which was not only more economical to rent but which was also practically the only theatrical venue in CT for which permits could be obtained allowing mixed races both on stage and in the auditorium. I was thrilled and inspired to hear the many exceptional voices performing in these productions and came to the obvious and logical conclusion that not only was a fine operatic voice a gift granted to all South Africans, irrespective of their racial origin, but that the love and appreciation of traditional European operas could also inform the soul of all our people.

In the early 1960’s the many and insistent demands made over a period of many years by South African performing artists to obtain official recognition and national funding for the formation of South African performing companies was heard and accepted at government level. This led to the formation of four so-called Performing Arts Councils (or Boards), one for each of the then existing South African provinces (Transvaal, Natal, Orange Free State and Cape Province). Although these Peforming Arts Councils took their name and were loosely modeled on their British counterpart, they had their own particular South African characteristics, the principal one being that they had to conform with and operate within the Apartheid laws then in force.

Each of the provincial Arts Councils was given an annual budget by central government, and within this budget each council had to operate departments which would be responsible for the production of Drama, Opera and Ballet. That these Performing Councils were ideated by the Apartheid Government solely for the benefit of white performers and white audiences was amply demonstrated by the fact that when the Nico Malan, the first multi-venue performing arts complex including an opera house built as a performing home for the Performing Arts Councils, opened its doors in Cape Town in 1971, it was declared a ‘whites only’ building. The wave of boycotts and protest that ensued soon caused the Government to revoke this policy and in a futile gesture the Opera House was declared open to all races. But this was clearly an example of far too little and far too late, particularly in view of the forced removals of the long term inhabitants from and the eventual demolition of the historical ‘coloured’ Cape Town area of District Six which was going on at the same time.

In vain did the artistic managements of and the performing artists working for the Performing Arts Councils try to use the existing legal loopholes to open performing doors in the operatic, balletic and dramatic fields to South African performers of all races. The era of protest theatre and international artistic black-listing was upon us, and those all too few black and coloured performers whose inner artistic compulsion drove them to accept to work for the Councils were branded as sell outs and traitors by their own communities. Opera, already considered by many as an elitistic and unnecessarily expensive artistic waste of time, had become synonymous with the Apartheid Government’s attempt to establish international credibility for itself and it was predicted that the advent of a new democratic regime would see the well deserved end of all operatic endevour in the country.

It was under this regime that my operatic career developed and altered from singer in 1964,(the year in which my debut in the Alhambra Theatre singing Keçal in Smetana’s Bartered Bride, the first opera mounted by CAPAB [Cape Performing Arts Board], through Staff Stage Director for CAPAB Opera in 1976, to teacher (I was appointed as Director of the UCT Opera School in 1982) to Artistic Director of CAPAB Opera in 1989. Of course I had had to wrestle long and hard with the option of leaving a country whose political system was so abhorrent to me or that of remaining in an attempt to change the system from within. So I accepted the opportunity given to me by my appointment as Capab Opera’s Artistic Director and tried to find collaborators who shared my vision and would work tirelessly to fill our stages with casts which would be truly representative of our nation’s demographics. I was blessed to be able to appoint Vetta Wise as our Chorus Master and Michael Williams as our Staff Stage Director. Vetta had done serious academic research in and had established cordial relations with leading members of several excellent black community choirs. Micheal had pioneered the writing of children’s operas based on South African indigenous stories and had succeeded in building the kind of community trust required to permit our operatic performers to enter the black community schools and perform under the banner of CAPAB Opera without physical danger and interruptions by protesters. It was for me a moment of great pride to be able to reflect the changing political situation around us by being able to present on the occasion of Rossini’s two hundredth anniversary in 1992 a concert version of Guglielmo Tell at the Nico Opera House with the choruses of men from Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden in Act II being sung by three separate black community choirs.

Our steady perseverance in tilling the vocal fields in the black communities was clearly successful, for, with the advent of our new democracy in 1994, we were rewarded with a flood of exceptional black vocal talent wishing to be admitted to the UCT Opera School. The gifts of some of the young singers who auditioned were such that I was led to propose the creation of a Studio Programme for CAPAB Opera, which would not only provide the funding necessary to cover the UCT Opera School tuition and basic living expenses for eight young singers, whatever their race, but also provide them with performing opportunities as soloists, understudies or choristers in CAPAB Opera productions.

In addition, our chorus master Vetta Wise and staff director Michael Williams agreed to undertake the additional onus of training a group of twelve young singers who had received no kind of previous musical or stage training and were taken from severely disadvantaged black communities. This project, which became formalized as the CAPAB Opera Choral Training Programme, expanded to the training of twenty-four singers in the next year and proved on of the most successful projects undertaken by our company because it created an exponential ‘ripple effect’. The CTP singers brought their passion for all the operatic music they had learned back to their community choirs and in only a few short years, opera, the art form which so many had sworn went against the very nature of our black communities, was in the throats and on the lips of thousands of glorious black voices, becoming the centerpiece of our national choral events and creating special competitions for young singers still at school.

The very special aptitude of the participants in these early programmes and their dedication was such that at the end of 1994, barely one year after the formation of the Studio and CTP programmes, it was possible for CAPAB Opera to mount the world première of ‘Enoch, Prophet of God’ and opera with libretto by Michael Williams and music by Roelof Temmingh, with all the black solo roles in the opera being sung by members of the opera Studio and with the CTP members singing as the black chorus required.

The existence of large numbers of exceptional operatic vocal talent among the black community could no longer be denied. What became a pressing artistic issue, however, was the creation of a suitable operatic repertoire for these singers and the possible adaptation of the production styles of the standard repertoire to create novel dramatic possibilities and credibilities, given the sudden transformation of operatic casts from being 98% white to casts being 98% black.

My immediate choice (1995) fell on Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, an opera of extreme complexity and technical difficulty, which had both a large cast and the copyright requirement of having all the black roles (and there are only two small white speaking roles in the opera) being cast by black singers. I felt this would provide an excellent challange for our newly formed training programmes and was fortunate in being able to invite several American specialists to participate either as conductor, director or soloists in the production. It gives me great joy that in this current Berlin season of the opera we have Willie Waters, who conducted our 1995 production, at the musical helm while many of the singers originally in the Studio and the CTP are either singing principal roles or are members of the Voice of the Nation Chorus.

Later examples of operas from the standard Western repertoire which were adapted to reflect particular South African cultural values and performed by our company (also in collaboration with UCT Opera school) were Bohème Noir, a version of Puccini’s opera which left the music intact but the libretto of which had been completely re-written by Hal shaper to set the story in Johannesburg in the midst of the student riots in 1976; a condensed version of Verdi’s Macbeth, focusing the musical and dramatic action on the two Macbeths and the Witches and setting the action in a completely African context (musical adaptation: Pieter van Dyk, Stage Direction Brett Bailey); Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, setting the Carthaginian action in a clearly African climate and alternating the original music with dance divertissements in authentic African idiom (African music by Dizyu Plaatjies and Amampondo, Stage Direction by Paul Stern).

Original operas were created to librettos provided by the passionate and indefatigable Michael Williams – Orphans of Qumbu, Buchuland, Love and Green Onions – with music by South African composers both black and white, but the key problem of what constitutes authentic and original South African opera remains as yet unsolved and will no doubt prove a point of major debate for some time to come, until we are fortunate enough to give birth to the equivalent of an African Verdi.

Regrettably, and predictably, our success in finding and developing operatic vocal talent was not matched by a sudden political change of heart as to the non-democratic nature of the Performing Arts Councils as originally created by the Apartheid Regime. This led to the New Democratic Government’s gradual but rapid and complete removal of any form of national funding for their arts companies. Any of the companies that wished to continue their work would have to re-group and find alternative sources of funding.

While the opera companies attached to the Arts Councils operating in Pretoria, Durban and Bloemfontein simply disappeared, in Cape Town we were fortunate that our efforts in the transformation of opera had been welcomed and backed by a number of opera loving and sympathetic businessmen. Under the determined chairmanship of Jan Kaminski, a Board of Directors was canvassed and the entire staff and functions of CAPAB Opera were re-registered as CAPE TOWN OPERA, a section 21 company not for gain

With the Government’s declining to increase the total amount of funding available for the performing arts and assigning the entire budget for this funding to a body known as the National Arts Council while permitting any and all performing groups to apply for a tranche of the funding, it hardly came as a surprise that Cape Town opera was at first refused any form of funding from this national source. Even now, after many applications and evidence of job creation for underprivileged communities, Cape Town Opera receives an amount of less than 5% of its total annual budget from national sources.

Obtaining funding from private and business sources proved and continues to prove extremely difficult, since the South African government provides no tax incentive for arts donations. Cape Town Opera was, however, fortunate in obtaining some additional financial support from the Regional Government of the Western Cape, as well as establishing a fruitful working relation with Artscape, the re-named subsidized company that operates the CT Operahouse, now known as the Artscape Operahouse.

More recently, the individual style and talents of the company have been recognized by a number of European opera managements and CTO has toured its productions of Showboat and Porgy and Bess to theatres in Nürnberg, Oslo, Umea and Malmö. The production of Porgy and Bess that is currently playing in Berlin has been conceived not only to reflect the particular intensity and energy of our South African singers, for whom the daily reality of their lives and simply going back home after a night’s work are more dangerous and more fraught with melodrama than any of the operas in which they perform, but also to set the action in the period of Apartheid’s highest arrogance and worst excesses, with forced removals and demolitions of ancestral dwellings competing with natural disasters to make life all too expendable and all too miserable for the many so conveniently forgotten by the few who live in comfort and security.

ANGELO GOBBATO

this article first appeared on capetownopera.co.za

Die EOAN-groep het in tye van donkerte in Suid-Afrika se geskiedenis “klanke van hoop gebring wat nooit stil geword het nie”.

Prof Russel Botman, US Rektor, het tydens die amptelike oorhandiging van die EAON Argief aan die Dokumentasiesentrum vir Musiek (DOMUS) in die Departement Musiek aan die Universiteit Stellenbosch (US), gesê dit is EOAN se geskenk aan Suid-Afrika vandag dat hulle “nooit ophou sing het nie”.

Die EOAN-groep was sedert die vroeë 1930s tot vandag ‘n aktiewe kulturele organisasie in die sogenaamde Kleurling-gemeenskap. Vanaf die middel van die vyftigerjare het EOAN onder leiding van Joseph Manca ‘n suksesvolle operageselskap geword. Die groep het vele opera- en ander produksies op die planke gebring tot in die sewentigerjare, wat ook nasionale en internasionale toere ingesluit het.

Prof Botman het gesê die gebeure van die aand resoneer betekenisvol op die vraag “Hoe hoor ons mekaar?’ “Ons hoor die lank vergete stemme van sangers, kore, repetiteurs, dirigente. Ons hoor die voete van dansers en die geluide van skoonmakers en kleremakers. Ons hoor die stootskrapers in Distrik Ses en die hartseer van die gepaardgaande ontworteling. Ons hoor die applous in konsertsale en operahuise. Ons hoor die stiltes van wat kón gewees het, en onvervuld gebly het.”

Prof Botman het ook gesê die geskiedenis van EOAN is ʼn belangrike geskiedenis omdat dit nie “net ʼn eggo is van bevrydingsnarratiewe tydens Apartheid nie”.

“Dit behels die verhale van individue wat as kunstenaars en musiekliefhebbers die beste probeer doen het in moeilike omstandighede. Hierdie verhale is nie eerstens verhale van politieke aktivisme nie, maar van liefde vir musiek, van omgee vir mekaar en van gedeelde drome.”

Prof Botman het ook gesê die US is trots om saam met die EOAN-gemeenskap die eerste tree te neem om hul verhale te dokumenteer.

Mnr Phillip Swales, voorsitter van die EOAN Trust, het gesê hy is “absoluut betower deur die erfenis wat agtergelaat is.”

“Dit was ʼn erfenis wat nie altyd erken was nie en soms vernietig was.”

Hy het beskryf hoe die lede van die EOAN-groep in teaters regoor die Kaap en verder opgetree het. “Hulle was nie gevra om dit te doen nie – dit was ʼn liefdestaak. Dit van ons diepste wese gekom.”

Hy het ook vertel hoe die lede van die EOAN-groep gewone mense met gewone werke was. “Hulle het hul gewone werk in die dag gehad maar hulle het die kulturele landskap van die Kaap, en ook ander plekke, verander. EOAN het uit die as verrys soos ʼn feniks en die kritici verstom.”

Die foto-versameling, wat in die foyer van die Konservatorium uitgestal word, is deur die fotograaf Cloete Breytenbach geskenk en beeld die spogjare van die EOAN-groep uit toe hulle vollengte operas aangebied het.

Onderskrif: ‘n Terugblik op die ou dae: Hier is van gaste wat die oorhandiging van die EOAN Argief aan die US bygewoon het, by van die foto’s wat die EOAN-geskiedenis uitbeeld. (Foto: Anton Jordaan, SSFD)

this article appeared in die burger of thursday 12 march 2009