(Francis
Mennigke appears in “The Blue Period of Milton van der Spuy”)
The 12th annual Hexagon Minifest takes
place in Pietermaritzburg this weekend, February 23 and 24. Among performances
of song, dance, and music are four award-winning theatre shows.
FEBRUARY
23
18h00: The Blue Period of Milton van
der Spuy by Greig Coetzee.
Milton van der Spuy has a few problems, and
they’re making him blue. He really wants to complete his next poem, but he has
hit a block with finding a rhyme for orange. He is desperate to finish his
current painting, except he cannot find a way to begin. And then there is the
constant danger that his head might explode…
Named after the famous poet, Milton is an
artist whose talents lie, um … elsewhere. His mother, a pathetic woman, who
tries to live vicariously through her son’s meagre talents, has filled his not
so intellectual brain with fantasies of being a great artist. Coetzee’s
extraordinary talent for comedy and pathos brings us a character who is at once
appealing and laughable, but draws us closer and closer to tragedy as we start
to distinguish between his artistic fantasies and the ugly reality.
Milton is naïve, simple and totally
compelling as he makes us face pretentious notions of Art and consider the
nature of beauty and tragedy within the comedic framework of a middle class
white South African man with no prospects. Despite his unique, ‘differently
abled’ mind, everyone can relate to this small man with huge dreams as he
struggles to fly above his own mediocre life.
From the 2017 Hilton Arts Festival to the
Cape Town Fringe Festival, playwright Greig Coetzee’s most simple, and yet most
complex character is brought to life by award-winning actor, Francis Mennigke,
in this production directed by Peter Mitchell.
19h45: Undalo by Ndumiso
Mazibuko
This play looks at the issues of rape and
gender inequalities. This is story of a young female who tells a story of how
rape became part of her life and the interrogation of the meaning of FEMALE.
This is a deep interrogation of the biblical, cultural and political impact in
this inequality. Can Ndalo answer these entire questions? The play alerts
society to the ramifications of indiscretions in life. There are many children
who are abandoned by their parents, at birth and left with grandparents, some
of them survive and grow up in pain and loneliness and at the risk of sexual
abuse. Just imagine an ideal world with no hunger for power, no crime, filled
with Ubuntu and caring for generation to come, is the ideal achievable?
FEBRUARY
24
12h00: Tswalo by Billy Langa. Directed
by Mahlatsi Mokgonyana
Tswalo is a tale told through lyrical prose, poetry and physical
storytelling entwined to interrogate the rules that govern life on earth, such
as power, creation, politics, connection, and intuition.
The performers’ expression of his ‘source’
being a spiritual quest that gives the audiences the baton to walk through
their own paradigm of ontology, Tswalo’s
poetry, prose and stories furnish us with the necessary tools into a deep
meditation. It undoubtedly begs the question (or theory) of being, becoming and
unbecoming.
Tswalo is the winner of the Cape Town Fringe Fresh Performer Award and
Cape Town Fringe Fresh Creative Award for Directing. In Tswalo, the performer’s expression of his spiritual “source” gives
the audiences the baton to walk through their own paradigm of ontology, the
poetry, prose and physical storytelling furnish us with the necessary tools
into a deep meditation.
To remember is an art form, to go into the
biological memory, and to rely on bone and DNA as sources of information in the
time travel of both past and future is an intuitive skill. To awaken the
primary senses in anatomy is perhaps the answer to the social responsibility
and the political queries of this world. Tswalo
is a body of poems constructed to fragment a narrative that is carried in both
physicality and Voice. It is placed in a timeless space of existence, which
explores the primary themes of being, chaos and beauty, blood and birth, love
and war in the same frame.
The multi award-winning production has
played to sold out houses and received great reviews and responses.
14h30: Kafka’s Ape. Adapted from
Kafka’s A Report to an Academy. Directed
by Phala Ookeditse Phala and performed by Tony Miyambo.
The play is about a primate’s struggle to
overcome the confines of captivity. It engages in an allegorical observation of
the South African society through the eyes of other; the ape Red Peter. In 2015
it won a Silver Standard Bank Ovation Award at the National Arts Festival.
A challenging play in which traditional
boundaries, categories, and norms are questioned; in which beauty, harmony, and
symmetry are usurped by cruelty, dissonance, and abnormality. It opens up the
reality that there exists something outside of and in addition to our “normal,”
“typical,” “wholesome” world, and that is “other”. The play thus compels
audiences to identify and to meditate on their rejoinder to other(ness) as it
highlights the complexities of identity in post-apartheid South Africa and in
the human race in general.
The Hexagon Theatre is a theatre complex
that is part of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg campus. For
more information phone 033 260 5537, email: hexagon@ukzn.ac.za
or visit www.hexagon.ukzn.ac.za/
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