(Ismail
Mahomed. Pic by Suzy Bernstein)
Ismail Mahomed is the Artistic Director of
the National Arts Festival. He writes in his personal capacity.
(Made
available in arrangement with the Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) and the
Dramatic, Artistic and Literary Rights Organisation (DALRO). See ACT’s website http://www.act.org.za/)
Forty years is a milestone for any arts
festival. This year the National Arts Festival celebrates the fortieth year
since its founding in 1974. Until 2003, I spent 20 of those years trekking to
Grahamstown as a freelance producer on the Fringe. In 2008, I found the mad
courage to take up the position of Artistic Director of the National Arts
Festival.
Reflecting on those early years as a Fringe
producer, I guess there was much similarity between me and an alcoholic. For
some reason, I trekked to one festival after the next in very much the same way
as an alcoholic who was reaching out for his next bottle. Anyone who has
produced work on the Fringe will acknowledge that there is nothing that
quenches the thirst for creativity more than drinking from the bottle of
euphoria that one finds at festivals.
Working as an independent freelance
producer had its own shares of joys, disappointments, struggles and
achievements. It takes hard work to initiate an idea for a production and to
find willing artists who are eager to collaborate with you. Sourcing funding for
productions is often a bigger back breaker.
There are many stories that I can tell
about those early years of trekking to Grahamstown as a fringe producer. There
are tales about vehicles breaking down midway en route to the festival city and
about hiking lifts from passing motorists. There are stories about sleeping on
thin mattresses in rented rooms so that saved funds could be used for paying
for posters and pamphlets. There are tales about of joys and the pains that
come with the glitz and the glamour of nursing the ambitions of directors,
designers, writers, actors and a whole team of backstage people who
passionately work behind the scenes to ensure that the curtains go up and that
there are bums on seats.
Those 20 years of being a fringe producer
were memorable and inspiring days. As difficult as they were, those early years
of working on the fringe festival were the stepping stones that ultimately
became my staircase to taking up the elevated position of Artistic Director of
the National Arts Festival. It was no easy task to walk into the huge shoes of
Lynette Marais, one of South Africa’s most celebrated arts administrators.
The challenge was enormous! How does anyone
walk the tightrope knowing that all eyes in the arts sector are focused firmly
on you? Taking the challenge required more than mad courage. It required a
determination to succeed.
Whilst my first year as Artistic Director
was filled with trepidation, each festival after that ended with a sense of
euphoria. Success does not come by itself. It is rooted and interwoven with
those with whom one surrounds oneself. Much of my success over the past seven
years can be credited to the giants on whose shoulders I can continue to stand.
Being an Artistic Director of the country’s
largest and oldest arts festival is no easy task. It requires much
self-interrogation about how one compiles or curates a successful programme. It
requires being prepared to place oneself at the fore-front of interrogating
those who define what is art, who makes art, how art gets made, who has access
to it, who funds it and just where it ends up after a festival season.
As a former mathematics teacher, my
fascination of moving from the chalkboard to the theatre stage is fuelled by
the opportunities that the arts offer to provoke those who try to define our
society. The arts give us the opportunity to fall outside of the narrow
definitions. I’m particularly excited about the arts when it becomes more than
just a passing moment of entertainment. Whilst the arts offer us the
opportunity to be entertained, it also gives us a greater opportunity to find
ourselves at the source of strange encounters. It gives us opportunities to
raise questions that are related to our being, our societies, our politics and
our identities which we try to constantly re-define and re-align.
The more we try to define who we are, the
more likely we are to fall into the trap of asking the question, “Eish! Is that
art?”
Over the last 40 years that the National
Arts Festival has been around, we haven’t yet found a singular homogenous
definition for art. It is impossible that the generation after us will find
that definition. Nevertheless, the ways in which we currently create art will
inspire them with newer curiosities. For as long as they continue to feed that
curiosity, art festivals will never become irrelevant. - Ismail Mahomed
Posts
