JOHAAR MOSAVAL WINS ACT LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

(Johaar Mosaval. Pic by John Hogg)

At their annual Awards this year, the Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) honoured one of South Africa’s most accomplished dancers for his exceptional talent and tenacity. At 88-years-old, Johaar Mosaval took home the Dance Lifetime Achievement Award, sponsored by JTI. 

Born in District Six in 1928, Mosaval never allowed the chains of Apartheid to restrict his dreams. First noticed at a primary school pantomime, he was invited to attend the UCT Ballet School from 1947 to 1949, an offer that was not supported by his Muslim parents or the white community.

While Apartheid laws prevented Mosaval from pursuing a dance career at home, it was arranged that he continue training at the Sadlers Wells Ballet School in London. In 1951 he entered the Royal Ballet School, graduating to the Royal Ballet Company a year later.

“The absolute pinnacle of my career was when I was chosen to dance my very first solo for the Royal Ballet, in the opera Gloriana, specially composed by Benjamin Britton for the occasion of the Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. This performance was attended by almost every reigning monarch, including Presidents and Prime Ministers from all over the world,” Mosaval recalls.

By 1963 he was ranked as principal alongside legendary dancers. This was the first of several historic milestones – he was also the first dancer of colour to hold the position of principal dancer in a world-renowned company.

In 1975 he retired from performance and became the first dancer to complete the Professional Dancer’s Teaching Diploma implemented by the Royal Opera House. That year, the Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship Award was bestowed on him by Britain’s Queen Mother, which enabled him to study contemporary dance and jazz in America.

His return to Cape Town in 1976 saw him as the first black dancer to perform in the Nico Malan Opera House. He was also the first black South African performer to appear on local television.

Mosaval opened his own ballet school the following year and was employed as the first black Inspector of Schools for Ballet under the Administration of Coloured Affairs. And although his school was shut down when Apartheid powers discovered that it was multi-racial, he continued to find ways to dance and teach.

His contribution to the performing arts has been recognised respectively by the Western Cape Arts, Culture and Heritage Award in 1999, the Premier’s Commendation Certificate in 2003 and the Cape Tercentenary Foundation’s Molteno Gold Medal in 2005, he was also awarded Civic Honours by City of Cape Town.

Mosaval says adding an ACT Lifetime Achievement Award to this list is an honour and a privilege. “Arts and culture has been an integral part of my life, and is an important part of South African heritage, one that we need to showcase. My hope is that young dancers dream to satisfy this hunger for the arts, and that they choose to perform these dreams with excellence, grace and physical beauty.”

Nomalungelo Faku, the Corporate Affairs and Communications Director at JTI says they are incredibly proud to sponsor this much deserved award. “JTI has many links with the artistic and cultural world, largely due to the numerous community investment (CI) programmes we have in place with some of the world’s best-known and iconic institutions. Similarly in South Africa, JTI aims to extend the rich legacy we have maintained in supporting arts and culture associations such as ACT.”

The 19th annual ACT Awards was hosted by Sun International in association with the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) and is supported by the Southern African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO), the Dramatic, Artistic and Literary Rights Organisation (DALRO), Media24 Books, the Nedbank Arts Affinity, JTI, Creative Feel, Business and Arts South Africa (BASA) and the Distell Foundation.

For more information about the Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) visit www.act.org.za

ALBIE SACHS WINS ACT LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

(Albie Sachs. Pic by John Hogg)

Among the six legends presented with Lifetime Achievement Awards at the 19^th Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) Awards was constitutional and creative crusader, Albie Sachs, who was honoured for his commitment to democracy, arts and culture in the country, often under exceptionally trying circumstances.

The cornerstone of the ACT Awards ceremony, which was held at Sun International’s The Maslow Hotel in Johannesburg in October, is the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Awards. Lifetime Achievement Award winners are nominated and selected by the current and previous ACT Trustees, and are always individuals that the sponsors are proud to acknowledge for their contribution to the arts.

Sachs was presented with the Arts Advocacy Lifetime Achievement Award, sponsored by Creative Feel. “DeskLink Media and Creative Feel won the Arts & Culture Trust Media Award in 2005 and are proud to have partnered with ACT ever since,” says Lore Watterson, the publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Creative Feel. “We became media partners to their annual Lifetime Achievement Awards and decided to sponsor a new category for Arts Advocacy in 2014.”

This year’s winner, the prolific author, activist and patron of the arts, Sachs, says the presentation of this award stirs a concoction of emotions; “I feel joy mixed with sadness, joy because flattery is the spice of life, and sadness because it contains more than a hint that you are over the hill.”

An iconic custodian of human rights in South Africa, Sachs was instrumental in projects such as the Freedom Charter in Kliptown, and was later a chief architect of the constitution.

As a defendant of all people, Sachs was continuously raided, restricted and restrained by the Apartheid government. After being held in solitary confinement for 168 days Sachs eventually went into exile in 1966, spending several years teaching and researching abroad. In 1988, a car bomb placed by South African security agents severed Sachs’ arm and destroyed his sight in one eye.

In 1990, Sachs return to South Africa and played an active role in the negotiations which led to South Africa becoming a constitutional democracy. After the first democratic election in 1994, he was appointed by then President Nelson Mandela to serve on the newly established Constitutional Court.

Sachs has continued to champion the arts and was involved with the development of the Constitutional Court building and its art collection. He personally collected and approached South African artists to contribute to the collection, stretching a paltry R10,000 budget into a multimillion rand collection, donating many of the pieces himself.

“Arts and culture represent the deepest aspects of ourselves, our dreams and doubts, our jolts and jubilations; all that is exasperating and elevating,” Sachs says.

These reasons and more make him an obvious candidate for the Arts Advocacy Lifetime Achievement Award. “A Lifetime Achievement for Arts Advocacy can be defined quite broadly as an award for someone who has continually championed the support of the arts,” says Watterson. “We feel that the recognition should go to someone who has ‘made the arts happen’ behind the scenes, someone who is not always recognised for the hard work that they put in to make the arts happen.”

Winner of the Tang Prize in Rule of Law in 2014, Sachs is currently using a portion of the award to tell the story of the making of South Africa’s democratic constitution. Sachs is also one of only two people to win the Alan Paton Award twice. A documentary about his life, Soft Vengeance: Albie Sachs and the New South Africa, by Abby Ginzberg, was released last year, and he is using this documentary in anti-bullying and anti-retaliation programmes, while also using his passion for creativity to inspire troubled youths.

His advice to the country’s young activists? “Don’t listen to the advice of older people like me, be as daring and aspirational and challenging as we were. And we achieved the impossible…,” he says.

The 19th annual ACT Awards was hosted by Sun International in association with the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) and is supported by the Southern African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO), the Dramatic, Artistic and Literary Rights Organisation (DALRO), Media24 Books, the Nedbank Arts Affinity, JTI, Creative Feel, Business and Arts South Africa (BASA) and the Distell Foundation.

For more information about the Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) visit www.act.org.za

PENNY SIOPIS NAMED ACT LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT WINNER

(Penny Siopis. Pic by John Hogg)

Visual artist Penny Siopis was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to the arts at the 19th annual Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) Awards, held at Sun International’s The Maslow Hotel in Johannesburg in October.

Lifetime Achievement Award winners, who are nominated and selected by the current and previous ACT Trustees, are individuals that the Awards’ sponsors are proud to acknowledge for the impact they have had on the South African creative industry.

Since 1975, Siopis has been exhibiting both locally and internationally. She says she is thrilled to have received this Award; “It is a wonderful recognition of my creative work, as an artist, but also a teacher.”

Throughout her career Siopis has won a variety of awards including the Volkskas Atelier Award and the Vita Art Now award. She says she has had a “wonderfully varied career” and that singling out a single pinnacle is an arduous task. “My solo show at the Freud Museum in London in 2005 was a unique and deep experience of working with ideas about the relationship between the psychological and the social, public and private, individual and collective, memory and history, in many different media.”

Well represented in collections both locally and abroad, Siopis became well known for her baroque banquet and history paintings. She used random objects in her work, which commented on colonialism, gender, and discriminatory practices of all kinds.

She is particularly interested in the intersection of biography and autobiography in narrating aspects of South African history through film, and the questions raised by the changes in local history. These concerns, centred on history and memory, have led her to become an important analyst of race and gender issues in the country.

She believes arts and culture are central to South African society on a primal level. “They offer a way to imagine in concrete form, to express what it feels like to be an individual and a community, to show what it is to be human.”

And to her, being an artist is not a vocation but rather a standard of living. “When you become an artist it is not a job, it is a way of life, a way of seeing the world always in new and surprising ways, even when the world seems old.”

Currently an Associate Professor in Fine Arts at UCT’s Michaelis School of Fine Art and the chairperson of the department's governing committee, Siopis’ advice to young artists is to be committed to their beliefs but also be open to the world around them. “Take risks. Be resilient. Don't be afraid to show your vulnerabilities,” she concludes. 

Tobie Badenhorst, the Head of Group Sponsorships and Cause Marketing at Nedbank says this Award, as well as the other Lifetime Achievement Awards presented on the night, are important nods to deserving figures in the South African arts world. “Through the Lifetime Achievement Awards we are reminded of the passion and dedication of South Africa’s renowned artists, who through their talent and works of wonder continue to shift the socioeconomic narrative in our country. As a bank that is committed to the development of South African arts and culture, we are humbled by their commitment and continue to celebrate their work.”

The 19th annual ACT Awards was hosted by Sun International in association with the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) and is supported by the Southern African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO), the Dramatic, Artistic and Literary Rights Organisation (DALRO), Media24 Books, the Nedbank Arts Affinity, JTI, Creative Feel, Business and Arts South Africa (BASA) and the Distell Foundation.

For more information about the Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) visit www.act.org.za

ACT HONOURS DR. MONGANE WALLY SEROTE

(Dr Mongane Wally Serote. Pic by John Hogg)

Pivotal South Africa poet, Dr Mongane Wally Serote has been lauded as the Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) Literature Lifetime Achiever for 2016. This Award, sponsored by Media24 Books, aims to acknowledge Serote’s significant contribution to South African prose.

“The Romantic notion of poets is that they are the prophets of society – sometimes with more justification than in other cases,” says Managing Director of Media24 Books, Eloise Wessels. “It is undoubtedly true that good literature critically reflects on the dominant issues in any society and provides an ethical perspective which is necessary for the health of the social order.”

Over the years, Serote’s writing has done just that. Renowned as one of the Soweto poets who embodied the literary revival of black voices in the 1970s, his work expresses the injustices and harsh realities of life for black people under apartheid.

Serote graciously received his Award at the 19th annual ACT Awards held at Sun International’s The Maslow Hotel in October. He says about receiving this Award; “I feel honoured. To be honoured in one's country, by one's countrymen and women, is a very important achievement.”

During his fruitful career Serote has received a number of prestigious awards. In 1973, after having published his first anthology of poems called Yakhal’nkomo the year before, Serote won the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize. The following year, he was granted a Fulbright Scholarship and travelled to Columbia University to complete a master’s degree in Fine Arts. His poems, particularly those from his first two anthologies, have been hailed as pivotal to the rise of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa.

He has also been the recipient of many other national and international awards, including the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa (1993); the Pablo Neruda Award from the Chilean government (2004) and the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver, here in South Africa.

As an active member of the Liberation Army, Umkhonto We Sizwe, Serote’s work has inspired, and continues to inspire generations of youth throughout South Africa, Africa and the world. His thought-provoking poetry not only expresses the effects that oppression had on South Africans, but it also stands as a timeless body of work that marks an important period in South Africa’s history.

The poet, who believes now is the time that South African literature should feature more heavily in South African curriculums at both school and university level says that “arts and culture can be the tapestry which weaves our nation together”. And he believes that in order to grow as a writer it takes both practice and perseverance. “Write and write and write,” he says, “but also, find a manner to put your ear on the ground.”

Wessels says that Media24 Books is honoured to sponsor this well-deserved Award. “At Media24 Books our business is the propagation of good South African literature. We are therefore honoured to have the opportunity to plough something back by acknowledging and celebrating iconic South African authors.”

The 19th annual ACT Awards was hosted by Sun International in association with the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) and is supported by the Southern African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO), the Dramatic, Artistic and Literary Rights Organisation (DALRO), Media24 Books, the Nedbank Arts Affinity, JTI, Creative Feel, Business and Arts South Africa (BASA) and the Distell Foundation.

For more information about the Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) visit www.act.org.za