sustained theatre

A key extract from the blog written by South East Regional Hub member Jenni Lewin - Turner on her recent visit to Grahamstown Festival.

GRAHAMSTOWN NOTES

It was a real honour to be selected for the Grahamstown Festival delegation and to be amongst such an impressive, dynamic and experienced peer group. The trip was really relevant to both my professional and academic interests, and from the outset I knew that I wanted use the opportunity to observe the audience development model used by the festival – you could say I’m on a personal mission to find a creative utopia that has a real cultural mix of people from different backgrounds amongst the audiences and administrators, as well as appearing on stage. I was also keen to network with both UK and South African artists, and to explore examples of international creative exchange. The South East Sustained Theatre Hub – who I was representing – also asked me to explore African rather than European practices and the policies affecting programming.

It really struck me early on that once in Grahamstown I really didn’t feel like I was in Africa at all – the layout of the streets and the architecture were all very Eurocentric - with a pub called the Rat & Parrot, a KFC and a Nando’s on the High Street I could have been anywhere in the UK even. I think I probably had romanticised visions of some of the imaginary I’d seen recently on TV in the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency, so maybe I was expecting there to be more of a culture shock, but it all felt very ‘home from home’ – just a different currency to contend with.

It’s hard to believe just how packed the programme for Grahamstown Festival is but I didn’t see enough material to really compare the quality of the productions so I’m hoping to find out more about this from my colleagues on the trip. I also wasn’t able to find out too much about the programming policies either but I intend to look into this further once the organisers have fully recovered from their mammoth task! However, I did get to see the fantastic opportunities there are for UK artists to participate in future festivals and there is certainly huge potential for a very broad range of collaborations to be nurtured. The trip also facilitated an excellent networking opportunity – both amongst the group of delegates and with the other artists and producers attending the festival from all over the world. I made some very interesting contacts that I’ll definitely be following up and I was also able to put quite a few people in touch with the relevant agencies who could help them, which was really satisfying. The flip side to this is the huge responsibility I now feel towards everyone that I spoke to – although I was always mindful not to build any dreams and raise expectations too high, it was clear that many people were looking for the resources and opportunities to help them reach the UK marketplace.

It was really interesting observing the audiences for the shows and the crowds wandering around the festival sites – for the outdoors activities there was a real mixture of ages, ethnicities and economic backgrounds. There were also a bewildering number of dialects – one of the producers I met spoke 11 local different regional languages and said this was commonplace! For the theatre productions I noticed that some had a distinct appeal to specific cultural groups, but it was clear that positive attempts had been made to include younger people and disadvantaged communities in the programming. There were some very popular ‘Community’ stages located on the outskirts to cater for the groups who may not have been interested in the events taking place in the more formal theatre settings. I’d really like to learn more about what strategies - if any - were in place to encourage the disparate communities to mix more, but the atmosphere was certainly very relaxed and people seemed really comfortable being amongst other ethnic groups, which I think surprised me and it made me reflect on my experiences here in the UK, as I have rarely come across such diversity at arts events. Although held over a much shorter period of time with fewer of the ‘high end’ productions, for me Grahamstown drew many comparisons with Brighton Festival – only it had dark faces in the audiences. It would be really good to hear if there are any innovative UK examples that have successfully managed to overcome the ‘Cotton Club’ mentality that happily has culturally diverse performers playing to mono-cultural audiences; there are many arts organisations that could do with a model of good practice to refer to, so that they too can better broaden, diversify and mix their audiences.

I feel that all in all the trip to Grahamstown Festival was a highly productive one and the insight gained from it will certainly be beneficial to the UK arts sector. The main tasks ahead will be to keep up the momentum and really build on these new relationships and opportunities to take the lead in developing international creative collaborations. There are already quite a few relationships and expectations to manage which will require a robust infrastructure and administrative system in order to take things forward effectively, but I think it’s a challenge that Sustained Theatre are well-positioned to move forward on.

Finally, I’m just really pleased that after all this time I got to dispel the Spitting Image myth that ‘you’ll never meet a nice South African’ (I couldn’t get the stupid ditty out of my head before arriving!) as I met many warm and friendly people. It has been 15 years since the demise of apartheid laws and there’s obviously still a long way to go before there’s true equality in the country, but amongst the artistic community there is an openness, understanding, commonality and generosity of spirit that could definitely teach the political factions a thing or two.