Open wide

Shark filmmaker Jeff Kurr on overcoming his ‘Jaws’-inspired fear

Jeff Kurr is a Los Angeles-based film-maker whose up close and personal shots of great white sharks make the iconic movie Jaws look like child’s play.

He has been filming for Discovery Channel’s Shark Week since 1991, and although he’s done nearly 30 shark doccies, he’s first to admit it took him a long time to overcome his “Jaws-inspired fear of sharks”.

There are many fascinating angles to explore when it comes to sharks and their behaviour, but in Great White Invasion – here’s the part where the hair on your neck stands on end – Kurr and his team have specifically focused their investigation on why Great White sharks are coming closer to our shores.

“What we have seen all around the world in a lot of popular beaches is that Great White sharks are coming closer and closer to shore,” he says. “We wanted to figure out why that is, and why they wouldn’t be attacking people. That’s an interesting thing to ask, as they are often very close to people.”

Through his filming, Kurr has found a few answers, many of which depend on the area and the species of shark involved. In False Bay, he found that Great

White sharks come close to shore (right amongst swimmers) when they pursue food sources, like smaller sharks, rays and fish.

They also found that they may be coming close to shore (into around five feet of water) just to warm up, because the warmer water that allows them to expend less energy. Kurr says that one of his biggest challenges as a filmmaker has been finding fresh angles. But the sweat and tears all pay off the minute you film one of those scenes that you know will be talked about for weeks.

“One of the coolest parts of the film is where Chris Fallows, the host of the show, decides to paddleboard with a Great White shark in Gansbaai,” Kurr says. “The reason he was doing that was to show that, when these sharks come in close to shore, they really have no interest in people. But it was amazing to see a four-metre Great White shark swim right under his board.”

Even for a filmmaker as experienced as Kurr, there’s a first time for everything, and one of his most memorable shark experiences happened in Gansbaai.

“We knew that sharks came in close to shore, but we had no idea that they were right in the waves – two metres of water. So what we did is we got on a small inflatable boat to check these sharks out,” he says. “Basically, it’s the type of craft that, if a shark bit it, you’d be in the water with these sharks.

“That’s the risk that we took. But we had a feeling that the sharks had no interest in us, and they looked at us and hung around, circling the boat,” Kurr says. “But they really had no interest in biting us. And for me, it was just a

thrilling, exciting experience, because I’d never seen Great Whites in water that shallow, just hanging out. That was very cool."

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Monday 29 August 2011.

Great White Invasion airs on Animal Planet (DStv channel 264) on September

7 at 8.05pm.

Chaos and collaboration

William Kentridge talks about time and man’s relation to it in his latest series of collaborative works

Being allowed  into William Kentridge’s studio at Arts on Main for a sneak preview of his latest collaborations feels somewhat like stumbling across a mad scientist’s chaotic laboratory. There are drums being “trained” to play themselves, as well as larger- than-life  wood and metal sculptures  sporting various  functional musical instruments, loud-hailers and levers.

In many ways, these structures are Kentridge’s proudest protagonists, and serve as a good starting point to describe the two-week programme of live events that Kentridge and a lengthy list of fellow artists are going to be putting on at the Market Theatre in September.

Broadly titled Refuse The Hour, a variety of diverse artistic events come together to join a larger dialogue about man and his relation to time. The machines that form part of the individual performance entitled Dancing With Dada (16-18 September) are in many ways the catalysts behind the overarching theme, and Kentridge himself  is the first to admit that they have a life and logic of their own.

Just as Galileo connected the beat of his pulse to the measurement of time, inspiring the dawn of pendulum clocks, Kentridge connects the beating of our hearts to man being a walking, breathing clock. In doing so, the animate machines on stage begin to take on distinctly human characteristics, from the concertina-like lungs to the moving “heads” of the loud-hailers and the spinning wheel acting as a flailing arm driving a violin  bow backwards and  forwards.

In working with dancer Dada Masilo and composer Philip Miller to produce the new and large-scale collaboration that is Dancing With Dada, Kentridge will be giving Joburg audiences a  prelude to a project that will take final shape at Documenta 13 in Kassel in 2012.

Dancing With Dada – which Kentridge says will be a bit like “taking a mixture of elements and different impulses, throwing them in a hat, shaking them violently and then throwing them all on stage” –  acts as a kind of a  microcosm for  all six individual performances and events that make up the final programme.

Audiences can expect collaboration at its finest, a cacophony of ideas, voices, sounds and ideas, all fighting for their place on the stage and,  as Kentridge predicts, all displaying a fair degree of entropy and disintegration into chaos despite  their best attempts at rescuing the situation.

Besides Dancing With Dada, there are various other noteworthy performances in the programme, such as the one night only cine- concert screening of 12 of Georges Méliès films (18 September) – followed by Kentridge’s own Journey To The Moon, a film that pays homage to  Méliès, who so inspired his work – as well as the first time that Kentridge will deliver his lecture I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine (7 September) to Joburg audiences.

The lengthy and impressive list of names and collaborators is reason enough to indulge in a few of the performances on offer, but there’s also the rare opportunity to see one of the South Africa’s most renowned artists in his element. Even Kentridge himself acknowledges this rare gathering of art and energy.

“If Dancing With Dada works, it will be shown next year in cities around the world,” he says. “But I suspect that it will be at its fullest and most chaotic in September, because we’re using a lot of musicians based here in Joburg, and if we took the performance overseas, we would have to trim it down quite a lot.”

Refuse The Hour is a two-week programme of live events on at the Market Theatre from September 6 – 18. Visit www.markettheatre.co.za for more information and for a full programmes. Tickets are available at the Market Theatre, the Goodman Gallery and Computicket.

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Wednesday 24 August 2011.

Hands-on history

The ‘Mud God’ Steve Brooker makes a living from  trawling the banks of the River Thames for treasures  

Steve Brooker answers to nothing except the ebb and flow of the tides and the muddy banks of the River Thames. Star of the History Channel’s new show Mud Men and a devoted “mudlark” (a member of the society of amateur archaeologists who are licensed to scavenge the banks of the Thames for historical artifacts), Brooker’s passion lies with the “hands-on history” he finds in the sludge and sand on the historically rich River Thames’s north side.

“It sounds quite sad,” he concedes, with a laugh, “but I work according to the tides; my diary is the tide tables. If you invite me out and it happens to coincide with low tide, I’ll probably come up with an excuse.”

Brooker made headlines in 2009 when he unearthed a 17th century ball and chain, but strangely it’s the “little” finds that  fuel his enthusiasm – items like a perfectly-worn child’s Roman sandal or a Georgian coin  rubbed smooth and engraved with a winged penis by a sailor headed for the brothels. on London’s south side.

“Mud Men is really about normal people – my ancestors and your ancestors,” he explains. "The foreshore was where the normal men from the street spent their time, and the foreshore  tells a million stories. The world loves those stories. These discoveries don’t have to be for archaeologists and academics. People at home watch the show and feel as though they could also do this. And sometimes, very occasionally, I do take groups around.”

While anyone can obtain a permit to search the five or so miles of the river’s southern foreshore, there are only 51 licensed mudlarks that are allowed to excavate the north side.  Strict rules, including one that states that all objects older than 300 years have to be taken to the Museum of London to be logged, are in place to preserve history and ensure  stories don’t get lost, Brooker says.

“Imagine someone came down willy-nilly, found something that may not have seemed valuable or interesting and took it away to store in their back cupboard. Then we’ve lost a piece of history. We need to have all the pieces, all that remains, to piece the story together,” he says.

Brooker loves sharing his finds with the cameras on Mud Men, but there are a few secret spots that he likes to keep to himself; spots that he says have taken years and years of experience to identify.

“The foreshore works in very strange ways. Sometimes it’s sandy, sometimes rocky, sometimes muddy, and you learn to look for certain things in certain places. I walk the foreshore with my trowel and I can see just by the way that the sand has eroded overnight that I will find something there,” he says.

The first episode of Mud Men airs on the History Channel (DStv channel 254) on Friday September 2 at 8.30pm. For more information on the show, visit www.history.co.uk/shows/mud-men. 

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Wednesday 24 August 2011.

Anyone there?

Artist James Webb channels Orson Welles in one of his most fascinating works yet

Only James Webb could turn the common answering machine into a dramatic space of jest, acknowledgment and serious artistic pursuit. His latest work Telephone Voice was conceived for the  Palais de Tokyo in Paris’s  monthly Répondeur exhibition of audio work that is created for the exhibition space’s answering machine. Webb approached the piece from the perspective of the answering machine as both a theatrical space and a time capsule of sorts.

“With these inspirations in mind, I knew that I had to make contact with the past, and more specifically, the dead,” Webb explains. 

In line with some of his previous projects – such as undergoing  hypnosis over a period of two years for his  artwork Autohagiography and attending spiritualist meetings for an installation  Prayer exhibiting at the Johannesburg Art Gallery next year – Webb worked with a psychic to channel the renowned American film director and screenwriter Orson Welles.

Welles is a fascinating choice, not only for his legendary direction and narration of H.G. Wells’s  War Of The Worlds, but also for the similarities that Welles’s artistic repertoire shares with Webb’s own portfolio.

“The theme of influence is of great interest to me, and Welles has cropped up in my own work many times. On one particular level, this project was a method of examining my own artistic ancestry. The notions of projection, influence and translation come up in the working process of all artists, and it's important to find creative ways of exploring and analyzing them.”

Although Webb is quick to concede that all of his work is sprinkled with a fair dose of humour and poking fun at conventions – or to use Welles’s own analogy, a tongue-in-cheek look at those that “buy snow from Eskimos” – there’s also a serious undercurrent that bolsters the work and provokes his audience into further thought and investigation.

“The work is both specific and open enough to encourage a variety of readings, and the message can be interpreted in numerous ways,” he explains. “I leave these answers for the audience to determine.”

As Telephone Voice draws to a close, Welles ends off (quite poetically) with “Call me if you need me”. Webb couldn’t have asked for better parting words.

“It is the ideal conclusion,” he says. “And I certainly plan on taking him up on his offer.”

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Wednesday 17 August 2011.

Telephone Voice runs until August 31.  To hear the work online, visit: www.palaisdetokyo.com/fo3/low/programme, click on the thumbnail at the bottom displaying an icon of James Webb’s Telephone Voice and then click on the “podcast” link.

Elegant opulence

Spa sophistication and a complete suspension of time and stress

Situated in the heart of the stylish Radisson Blu Sandton hotel, the Amani African Spa is as much a gem as the semi-precious stones that its 10 ten treatment rooms are named after.

Echoing the bold decor and striking interior design of the hotel itself, the spa boasts a sophistication and understated sense of opulence. The treatment rooms share the same lofty views of the City of Gold as the hotel suites, something that further emphasises a complete breakaway from the stresses of city living and a suspension of time and stress while one is comfortably “living the high life”.

 

Purple is a colour often associated with royalty, which might explain why, after a few short minutes spent in the luxurious  Amethyst Room, customers comfortably slip into the role of an African king or queen, even if only for a day.

An inviting massage bed – overflowing with warm fluffy towels – sucks you in, the aromatic bergamot and grape seed oils start to wield their charms and slowly an hour-long hot stone massage kneads every last ounce of tension out of your muscles.

The secret of this signature Amani spa treatment lies in the winning combination of a cocoon-like  dark room and the comforting warmth of the hot stones that serve to both  relax  muscles and warm up tight muscles so that the  therapist can work more deeply and quickly.

Whether the smooth, flat heated stones are used either as extensions of the therapists’s hands or  very pleasantly placed on the pressure points of one’s body while the therapist works on another part of your body, the end result of a hot stone is a feeling of such calmness and relaxation that one  feels quite comfortably  numb.

My therapist wisely advised me to take a few minutes to “wake up” before reluctantly tearing myself away from the room. Too often after a spa treatment people don’t factor in a bit of relaxation time, instead immediately opening themselves back up to the stresses of e-mails beeping on their phones and meetings that need to be scheduled.

Nothing can quite undo that sense of inner peace (the name Amani, incidentally,  means “peace” in KiSwahili) as quickly as the power button  on your Blackberry, which is why half an hour or so in the Amani’s bubbling Vitality day pool proved to be the perfect tentative step back into the real world.

The range of treatments on menu are extensive, and the spa  offers new therapies such as salt therapy in their salt room and a signature five-step hydro journey.

Customers are also welcome to make use of some of the hotel’s facilities, such as the pool and relaxation deck and loungers, or ordering off the delicious lunch and dinner menus.

For more information on the hotel and spa, visit www.rezidor.com and www.radissonblu.com/hotel-johannesburg or call 011-245-8088.

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Friday 12 August 2011.

Artistic adornments

Artist Severa Rech Cassarino on juju, jewels and the romance of travel

   

When she’s not putting oil to canvas and creating the bold paintings that she is  best known for, artist Severa Rech Cassarino casts her eye on a much more intricate endeavour. Drawing on the same impulses of expression, meditation and losing herself in the moment that her canvasses require, Rech Cassarino is as adept at applying the principles of  colour and composition to paint  as she is to glass, stone, crystal and coral. 

Inspired by anything  from history and geography to mythology and the romance of travel, Rech Cassarino’s range of Juju art jewellery speaks to the dreamer’s soul. In her combinations of Ethiopian silver, coral and turquoise lie stories of Venice and her roots in northern Italy, while her latest pieces sporting materials such as seeds and wood tell the tales of eco-consciousness and planet Earth.

Beads are not just beads, they are small adventures in themselves, each one uniquely beautiful and full to the brim with its own stories. It goes without saying then that, as with her paintings, each piece of art jewellery has a title that alludes to the original inspiration behind the work. Whether from her Elemental Mother Earth, Katmandu or ancient Kings and Queens of Africa range, each and every piece of Rech Cassarino’s art jewellery is a unique hand crafted creation.

“I thought I would run out of inspiration by now, but I’ve done about 300 pieces so far, and I’ve never felt the need to make one exactly the same as another,” says Rech Cassarino.

There is a  firmly entrenched history of beads as mediums of trade, ornamentation and magic in Africa, but Rech Cassarino moves beyond that and puts jewellery in the realm of celebration.

“In the early days women started wearing amulets to ward off evil. Today I  feel that while early women wore jewellery to protect themselves, we have now arrived at the point where the necklace is meant to celebrate life.

“I think of the book  Eat, Pray, Love and I want to add ‘celebrate’, because I think it’s something women often don’t do,” she explains.

The name she gives her art jewellery – Juju – is a West African term for a magical object, and refers to something being  a kind of a talisman or good luck charm. Unlike her paintings, which she says are possibly more academic, her art jewellery is “unashamedly decorative” and an ornamental statements of celebration and beauty.

Rech Cassarino’s jewellery is available from various stockists (such as the Wits Origins Centre,  Classic Revivals in Parktown and The Clan at The Glen shopping centre), but at the end of this month she will be exhibiting her jewellery (along with a selection of her oil paintings) for the very first time.

The Juju jewellery and art exhibition by Severa Rech Cassarino takes place at La Società Dante Alighieri (www.ladantejhb.co.za/ 011-483-2339), 62a Houghton Drive, Houghton Estate, Johannesburg, for the weekend of  Friday August 26  to Sunday 28.

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Wednesday 10 August 2011. All photos courtesy Marius Henning Photography.

Tight knit concept

MaXhosa Knitwear stitches  culture, tradition and design neatly together  

Laduma Ngxokolo proudly acknowledges that it was his mother who taught him to knit. As  a 16-year-old it might have taken him a while to get his work to the point where he says he was satisfied with it, but more importantly, a passion took root that has directed Ngxokolo’s life and studies ever since.


Fast forward a few years and Ngxokolo’s first tentative stitches have developed into a local success story. What started out as a student project at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University last year has become a phenomenon that even Ngxokolo struggles to fully grapple with, especially after the stir he caused at this year’s Design Indaba. 


MaXhosa Knitwear was inspired by Ngxokolo wanting to design a range of men’s knitwear for amakrwala (a tradition amongst the Xhosa communities in the Eastern Cape where hundreds of Xhosa boys aged between eighteen and twenty-three attend Xhosa circumcision schools for a manhood initiation ritual). Before amakrwala go to a circumcision school, Ngxokolo  explains that all their old clothes have to be given away (as a sign of the end of their boyhood) and their parents have to buy them a range of new clothing – part of which  includes high quality men’s knitwear. 

“I was initiated in 2007, and the clothes we had to wear had no resemblance to Xhosa traditions at all. So I took that problem and tried to find a solution for it,” he explains.


Inspired by an art exhibition titled Ubuhle Bentsimbi (The Beauty of Beadwork) which was exhibited at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum during the 2010 Soccer World Cup, Ngxokolo began to painstakingly develop those designs into knitwear patterns.  


Not only was this a huge technical challenge, especially with the dated software and machinery that SA has to offer, but his designs also had to be trendy and appealing to a youthful audience and  possess a high quality and longevity (so that they could be passed down to the next generation). 


The hard work definitely paid off. MaXhosa Knitwear proudly boasts five different styles of knitwear, including trendy cardigans and longsleeve pullovers, all of which are made with 80% marino wool hand spun and dyed in SA. Although  thus far Ngxokolo concedes that his clients are largely Cape Town based, he has also received orders from some initiates, who are glad to have a local and proudly South African alternative to the Pringle and Lyle & Scott labels of the world.

This article was first published in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Thursday 4 August 2011.


To contact Laduma Ngxokolo, e-mail him on  ngxokolo.laduma@gmail.com or visit www.maxhosa.co.za / www.africanknitwear.com. MaXhosa Knitwear will be exhibiting at Decorex (in Joburg from August 5 – 9  at Gallager Convention Centre in Midrand) as part of the Gabi Gabi 2011 textile showcase. Visit www.decorex.co.za for more information.

Telling stories

Illustrator Maria Lebedeva puts pen, pencil and paint to paper

Freelance illustrator Maria Lebedeva is as much an artist as she is a storyteller. She was born in Russia (hence the recurring images of bears, wolves, foxes and rabbits in her work) and although she came to South Africa soon afterwards, she acknowledges that the stories her grandmother told her as a little girl still swirl around in her imagination, giving rise to imaginative illustrations and sparking new story ideas that mix real life and fantasy to create a bit of magic on the page for her readers.

Lebedeva, whose exhibition Paper Tales will be showing at Wolves Café for the month of August, started out studying Information Design at the University of Pretoria. She confesses that although she was never much of a designer, her love of drawing led her to seek out the masters in illustration at Stellenbosch University that she is currently working towards finishing.

The exhibition is largely inspired by the work she is doing as part of her masters, and comprises just under 50 hand-drawn illustrations, some of which form open-ended series of narratives and others of which form part of two books that she compiled as part of her coursework last year.

Lebedeva believes that “stories are all we have” and values the power of story telling immensely. Although some of her stories might feel vaguely familiar, there’s an edge of originality to all of them that makes them unique and utterly intriguing. Mu’s Wolf Problem, for example, is a melange of stories from her mother’s childhood, Little Red Riding Hood and a Russian lullaby (about a wolf that comes to steal a baby from its cot).

Appropriately for an exhibition showing at Wolves Cafe, the book recounts the story of a little girl who gets left alone at home and receives a visit from a wolf.

“She can hear suspicious noises in the house, and although very scared, sets out to investigate,” Lebedeva elaborates. “Quite unexpectedly, she finds there is a wolf in her passageway, and she screams so loudly that she scares the wits out of him. It turns out the wolf doesn’t want to eat her, he is just lonely and wants a friend. The wolf and girl engage in a series of fun activities, until her mom comes back home, and the wolf has to say goodbye.”

Ten of the artworks on exhibit in Paper Tales are sourced from this book, and there will also be two drawings on exhibit that are part of a series of drawings from her true life story book Paper Sails, which tells the story (passed on by her grandmother) of a little girl who reconnects with her sailor father and is left disappointed when he isn’t anything like she dreamed he would be.

The remaining 34 artworks that make up the exhibition are subtle watercolours and acrylics, layered in intricate details and meaning. It’s in these works that one sees how fine lines, expressive gestures and moody colours become Lebedeva’s signatures, along with deliberately open-ended narratives that she hopes will force her viewers to walk away from her works having made up stories of their own.

Paper Tales exhibits at Wolves Cafe, 4 Corlett Drive, Illovo (www.wolves.co.za), from August 5 – September 1.

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Tuesday 2 August 2011.

Tactile textiles

The urban inspiration behind Yda Walt’s hand stitched material masterpieces

  

Walk into Yda Walt’s Auckland Park studio and you’re greeted by a sea of buttons, materials, cottons and threads in every colour imaginable. The artist and designer sees downtown Johannesburg as a veritable “treasure trove”. When she’s not perusing President and Diagonal Street, buying material for her artworks, then she’s quietly sitting on a street  corner, photographing urban street life as it passes her by.

All of the images depicted in Walt’s canvasses, bags, cloths and ceramic ware are based on real life scenarios. She always starts her inspiration with a photograph from her now ample archive of images, and from there uses her artistic licence to (literally) stitch together a colourful collage that invariably evokes a typically South African scene.

Whether it’s a woman carrying a bucket of water on her head or a man patiently waiting for a taxi, the two-dimensionality of the bold felts she uses are perfectly complimented by the three-dimensionality of the found objects she attaches to her canvasses.

There are probably as many stories behind the artworks as there are layers of material. The dominos that have come to be her signatures of sorts, for example, Walt buys from a shop often frequented by sangomas. She explains that because sangomas are after specific numbers only, she gets the remaining unwanted dominos for an absolute steal. The same goes for the broken neon rulers she hoards away in her studio, as well as the plastic belt buckles and various other odds and ends.

“The thing with going downtown is that you never know what you’re going to find,” she confides. “And you cannot go with a specific purpose; if you go looking for something specific you will probably never find it, you have to just stumble upon things. Sometimes buy things I love, and they sit here for a while until I find the right place for them.”

From taking the initial photographs to drawing her images and producing linocuts of them, ready to be printed, every step is labour intensive and done by hand, but therein lies the charm.

“I’m changing the way that I’m working –   I actually don’t want to become a factory and I can see that it could easily happen,” says Walt, who has recently been commissioned by Wedlandts to produce a series of neutral coloured canvasses. “I love being hands on, and I definitely don’t want to be just a manager. I would rather employ people to take some work home, sew it and then bring it back.”

In a country suffering from such high unemployment levels, Walt has found a way of helping out by hiring unemployed women to help her with the hand stitching on her artworks. At the moment her works are currently sold in a few select stores around Johannesburg and Cape Town, two prominent Johannesburg stockists being Imagine Nation Homeware at 44 Stanley and Service Station in the Bamboo Centre in Melville. She will also be exhibiting her work at the Gabi Gabi showcase at Decorex this year and hopes that the exposure will see her colourful creations popping up in more outlets.

This article was first published in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Wednesday 3 August 2011. 

For more information on Decorex, visit www.decorex.co.za. For more information on Yda Walt, visit www.ydawalt.co.za.