(Mike van Graan recently won the Fleur du Cap Theatre award for the Best New South African Play for Die Generaal, a searing drama about the effects of violent crime on race relations in post-apartheid South Africa. Below is an extension of his acceptance speech.)
By Mike van Graan: Last year’s winner in this category - Lara Foot-Newton’s excellent Karoo Moose – and Die Generaal were both commissioned by the Aardklop Arts Festival to celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2007 – with generous sponsorship from ABSA. These consecutive awards affirm the important role that festivals and the private sector play in producing contemporary South African theatre.
A combination of government policy that has transformed publicly-funded theatres into “receiving houses”, robbing them of funds to produce new work; the sheer bureaucratic ineptitude of the Lottery that presides over vast resources for the arts but lacks the vision, will and capacity to use these resources effectively, and the reactive and limited nature of funding from the National Arts Council, have placed the burden of theatre production largely on the shoulders of the country’s three largest festivals: the privately-funded ABSA Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in Oudsthoorn, the Aardklop Arts Festival in Potchefstroom and the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, that nowadays receives its core funding largely from public coffers.
The nature of arts funding has also ironically polarised theatre-makers in post-apartheid South Africa with Afrikaans theatre generally sustained through the extensive circuit of Afrikaans festivals, with only a limited number of the annual harvest of Afrikaans plays being seen in the country’s premier theatres. Theatre in other indigenous languages is often the preserve of “community theatre” ghettoes that prevent them from eligibility for professional theatre awards, while theatre in English – irrespective of the home language of the theatre makers – is the primary vehicle to access the markets of the National Arts Festival (with its roots in celebrating the English language), the major theatres of the country and the international markets still interested in South African theatre.
Given the proliferation of Afrikaans festivals and their private sector muscle (at least until the recent economic crisis), it is probably no coincidence that three of the four plays nominated in this year’s “Best New South African Play” category are in Afrikaans.
According to an article in the Sunday Times of 8 March 2009, ABSA – a major player in arts funding - is under fire from some politicians for its decision to make funding available to political parties only after the elections. I’m not sure why the private sector funds political parties at all.
In the arts sector, we often hear that business is reluctant to sponsor the creative activities of artists because of the potentially controversial nature of artistic work. Yet, business happily spends millions on sponsoring sport where hardly a fortnight goes by without some damaging boardroom controversy, or where there is some indiscretion by a leading sports star “role model” or where the sponsored team embarrasses the country – and the sponsor - on the playing fields.
If reluctance to be associated with controversy is a criterion for determining private sector sponsorship, then it is even more inexplicable why business funds biographies of sitting politicians, or political parties that – certainly during election campaigns – sling and attract mud, both for themselves and their sponsors. It is also political parties – particularly those that govern at whatever level of society – that often, simply by virtue of having political power, do controversial things that compromise our nascent democracy and undermine our country’s constitution.
Born nearly a hundred years ago, Gillo Dorfles, an Italian painter (and prolific essayist) wrote that “…art, however one defines it, must mirror, favourably or with hostility, the development of the society to which it belongs. Inevitably, contemporary art too, reflects the complex and divisive social, political and ethical state of our civilisation”.
In his powerful Nobel Prize for Literature lecture in 2005, the now late playwright Harold Pinter said “When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move one millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision, we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.”
Another leading British theatre-maker, John McGrath, writes that “…theatre is, or it can be, the most public, the most clearly political of the art forms. Theatre is the place where the life of a society is shown in public to that society, where that society’s assumptions are exhibited and tested, its values are scrutinised, its myths are validated and its traumas become emblems of its reality. Theatre is…a public event, and it is about matters of public concern.”
This, then, is to thank the Fleur du Cap judges for their recognition of Die Generaal which is not easy, escapist entertainment to which to take clients and key service providers to build corporate relationships, for it deals with some of the more challenging questions of our time: violent crime, its adverse effect on relations between different communities and the racism it breeds, poverty, corruption, and the like.
South Africa has a long tradition of theatre that is intimately linked to the political, social and economic fabric of the society. During the apartheid era, there was a commonly held view that the “personal is political”, that the life experience of individuals was directly impacted upon by broader social, economic and political forces; that individuals could in turn impact on these forces; that the individual and the collective, the micro and the macro existed in a dialectical relationship with each other. This is no less true in post-apartheid South Africa where macro political, economic and social forces impact directly on individuals with deeply moral, psychological, physical and emotional consequences - the stuff of dramatic exploration.
Ours is a country full of contradictions, of irony, of complexity - a great place for writers, for artists. Yet there are those who argue against socially-engaged theatre work, offering a variety of reasons, from the superficial “audiences are tired of politics”; the denialist “the days of protest are over”; the defensive: “the main purpose of theatre is to entertain” and the attempt at political literacy: “there is now a legitimate government in place and a free media so theatre no longer needs to play the conscientising role it had to under apartheid”. Still others believe that progressive theatre makers should not give ammunition to “the enemy” to feed criticism of the government, or that while it is one’s constitutional right to criticise those in power, the time is not right to do so. Political correctness has become a new form of censorship. But the choice to disengage art and theatre from the prevailing social, economic and political conditions, is itself a political act.
By its very nature, art – and theatre in particular – poses hard questions, reflects the difficult challenges being grappled with by individuals within particular historical moments, poses alternatives and celebrates life, optimism and human endeavour even within trying circumstances. It is thus inevitable that the arts and artists will be “controversial”, particularly if the alternative visions they present counter the prevailing dogmas and political, social and economic interests of hegemonic forces.
The struggle for democracy, for human rights, for freedom of expression is never truly won. All that changes are the conditions in which the struggle for these takes place. It is a struggle we are obliged to engage in, not just as citizens, but as artists. For ultimately, democracy exists for us, not for politicians or ruling parties or those who fund or sponsor them in their elitist interests. When we retreat from these struggles, we allow others to define democracy in their self-serving image.
The right to freedom of artistic creativity and the right to freedom to receive or impart information or ideas are now guaranteed in the Constitution. Yet, this right is meaningless unless one has the resources to be able to create and to distribute one’s ideas, views and values through the arts, including theatre.
this speech first published on artslink.co.za
