Boundaries of both audiences and performers
are extended with the Performance Art offering from the National Arts Festival,
Grahamstown.
In a performance cycle entitled Anthea Moys vs. The City of Grahamstown,
the (first ever) Standard Bank Young Artist for Performance Art, Anthea Moys,
will compete against the people of Grahamstown in a tournament of skill,
strength, and artistry. Over a series of seven contests over seven days,
outnumbered and outclassed, Moys will single-handedly do battle against
Grahamstown’s best teams: its athletes, its artists and its intellects ... Moys
has spent three months prior to the Festival learning the skills she will need,
from the teams and cultural groups against which she will be competing, and
these contests will be documented in a living exhibition that will grow and
evolve over the course of the Festival, as the documentation for each of the
performances is installed in the Monument Gallery.
Swiss artist/performer Yann Marussich is a
unique character of the contemporary dance genre, and delivers performances
which have a striking impact on the audience. Disturbing, provocative and
authentic, his performances and choreography have been staged across Europe and
other parts of the world since 1989. In Bleu
Remix, Marussich, returns to the theme he explored in 2001 in the Bleu Provisoire creation, when he let a
mysterious blue liquid ooze as blood would, through the layers of his skin, as
though it was a final effect or a by-product of his body’s inner processes.
Each time Bleu Remix has been
performed, a different musician has accompanied Marussich. The spontaneous
meeting of two artists brings further elements of risk and uniqueness to the
event, as the music explores the creation over and over again and depicts new
ways of perception. In Bain Brisé,
Marussich is covered under a mountain of glass shards in a bathtub from which
he slowly emerges over the course of 90 minutes. The initial sense of danger is
interfered by the astonishing aesthetic realm of the work ... the crystal-like reflection of the glass in
the light, and its reflection on the wall, and the slow and gracious movements
of the body.
Since the introduction of the Standard Bank
Ovation Award in 2010, Gavin Krastin has won a Standard Bank Ovation Award each
year for his off-the-wall creative interventions in public spaces, and for his
work as a newly emerging performance artist. Half performance and half social
experiment, his 2013 offering - Rough
Musick - interrogates the hierarchical social dynamics imbued in archaic
shaming rituals and explores the emotional effect of shame when it is used as a
means to control and cohere. Through Krastin’s striking theatricality and
characteristic heightening of the visual image, the pre-Empire white culture of
the United Kingdom is rendered exotic and strange, positioning the
artist-of-European-descent as the ‘primitive’ and ethnically-other. Set in the
dank stone confines of the St Andrew’s College old changing rooms, spectators
of this ritual are invited to become agents of shame and explore their own dark
desire to ridicule, humiliate and judge this performer-other.
Francisco López is internationally
recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music
scene, and collaborates on Untitled #310
with musicians Jill Richards, Waldo Alexander, Magda de Vries, Reza Khota,
Marcus Wyatt and Siya Makuzeni. His work is primarily based on original field
recordings as source material for the creation and generation of immersive
virtual sonic worlds, and for more than thirty years he has developed an
astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a
profound listening of the world. His unorthodox composition strategy consists
of having the musicians blindfolded, thus replacing both scores and visual cues
with aural cues that the performers have to carefully listen to within the
music textures as they perform the piece. This new composition by López for
this blindfolded ensemble of South African musicians has been developed and
composed in South Africa.
The 39th edition of the National Arts
Festival, Grahamstown will take place from June 27 to July 7 2013.
The National Arts Festival is sponsored by
Standard Bank, The National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund, Eastern Cape
Government, Department of Arts and Culture, National Arts Council, City Press and
M Net.
To link to the Festival’s website, click on the banner at the top of
this page
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