Porra power

Sonia Esgueira on playing the hairy daughter, stereotypes and the secret to her one woman show’s six year success

Only the sassy Sonia Esgueira can admit that she loves her own jokes and still come across as absolutely charming and utterly humble.

“If people don’t laugh, I am like ‘I don’t understand people, I mean come on. This is gold here, I am giving you gold’,” she jokes, before bursting out into contagious laughter and chatting some more about bringing the newly director Porra’Licious back on to the stage.

Ask Esgueira what the secret of her success is, and she will graciously rattle off about how grateful she is for the support and encouragement. There are the odd shows where audiences don’t laugh as hard as they should  (on these nights Esgueira melodramatically threatens to “give it all up and become someone’s PA”), but more often than not her loyal supporters are steadily chuckling away at some of the harsh but nevertheless endearing truths that play out on stage.

“I am  lucky to have so much support, and I  think it’s because I have a very niche market that supports me 1000%,” she elaborates. “They come out in their droves and word of mouth spreads to the rest of the Portuguese community. Actually, I think that’s the secret to theatre success – to have a strong target market. People want to know about themselves, and they want to laugh at themselves. If I wasn’t doing the show, I would have gone to see it,” she says, again bursting  out laughing.

In Porra’Licious, the third installment in the uber successful one woman trilogy that Esgueira fondly labels “a romantic comedy for the stage”, her larger than life characters like Paula (ever longing and looking for “the one”) and the macho man  Rui Ferreira (ever chasing the same  Afrikaans poppie) have matured somewhat and are that much closer to finding the happily ever after’s that they have been so desperately seeking  over the years.

Under the new co-direction of Helen Iskander and James Cuningham, Esgueira says that audiences can expect a show with depth and a lot of physical mime and gestures throughout the monologue. She also says that while the characters in the first installment Porra were quite strongly stereotypical, the third installment really sees them coming into their own.

“I think with the first Porra I really played into the stereotypes. I was doing a show about one community in a country with so many different languages, cultures and communities, so I felt I needed to make the characters and their stories very accessible and recognisable, you know, like the cafe owner and the  hairy daughter. But later the characters became their own people.”

Esgueira is the first to admit that writing  Porra’Licious, which is in many ways the end of an era,  was an emotional experience. She’s not saying that it will never return to the stage, but she is also keen to stretch her creative muscles and try something new. Once this run has finished at the Studio Theatre, she says she’s excited about a new one woman she’s working on for next year. All she will reveal for now, however, is that it’s a mainstream comedy about “one person’s search for something”. 

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Tuesday 4 October 2011.

Porra’Licious is on at the Studio Theatre, Montecasino from  October 5 to  November 13. Tickets are R150 at the theatre (011-511-1988) or Computicket (www.computicket.com).

   

Creative chaos

William Kentridge takes to the stage and explores the concept of the division of the self 

9/10

SHOW: I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine by William Kentridge

VENUE: The Market Theatre, 56 Margaret Mcingana Street, Newtown, Johannesburg

There’s complete silence as an already captivated Joburg audience watches William Kentridge pacing the stage just before he commences his world famous lecture I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine. Not only is it the opening night of the two-week series of live performances  Refuse The Hour at the Market Theatre, but it’s also the very first time that Kentridge has performed this lecture  in Joburg (it was first  presented in SA at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town in 2008).

The clock strikes eight, the lights dim, Kentridge stops reading his notes, looks up sharply from behind  his glasses at the audience and launches into a passionate retelling of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol’s short story, The Nose.

Gogol’s story about a man who wakes up one morning to discover that his nose  has detached itself from his face and walked off to achieve a higher rank in society is itself based on Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1928 opera The Nose, and using both of these source texts Kentridge extends the themes of the division of the self and the terror of hierarchy to create a theatrical monologue that is both thought-provoking and full of humour, as well as moving and somewhat tinged by nostalgia.      

      

At one point in the monologue Kentridge alludes to the piece’s Dadaist undertones, saying that as the artist his job is not to make sense, only to make the drawings. He also casually throws away pieces of his “script”, later picking them up and reading lines and paragraphs at random, creating an air of chaos and adding to that sense of the nonsensical that the Dada movement was renowned for.   

 

I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine is in many ways Kentridge’s exploration of just how much of the outside (supposedly rational) world we need lodged with all of us, and he does so using comical background videos of himself (some of which even boast two digital  video Kentridges pacing behind the “real” Kentridge, further driving the concept of the divided self forward) and beautifully llustrated and edited projections that fuse  artworks, paper silhouettes and old Soviet film snippets to add layers of meanings and possible interpretations to this already intricate monologue.

This article was first published in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Friday 9 September 2011.

Refuse The Hour is a two-week programme of various live events at the Market Theatre until September 18. Visit www.markettheatre.co.za for more information. Tickets available at the theatre, from the Goodman Gallery and Computicket.

  

Playing presidents

Two great minds spar it out with a war of words

To play the parts of former presidents FW De Klerk and Nelson Mandela is no easy feat, but before they could even think about the mammoth responsibility that would rest on their shoulders the minute they stepped onto the stage,  Eric Nobbs and Owen Sejake had to get their heads around the intense legal arguments in The Prize Of Peace’s weighty script.

Sejake jokingly calls the back and forth dialogues an “intellectual gymnasium”, while Nobbs  says that director Clare Stopford and writer Les Morrison’s ears must have burned in those first few days of rehearsals. 

Jokes aside, however, both actors say that they feel honoured to be performing such a well-researched script, one that has been carefully compiled from various books and texts and rare face-to-face interviews with De Klerk himself and Mandela’s lawyer George Bizos.

When Nobbs met with De Klerk, he laughingly confides that the former president’s only request was not to play like the “apologist fool” Michael Caine did, but from the start of rehearsals, the cast and crew decided not to have Nobbs and Sejake mimic the accents or gestures of the real people.

“The script is factually 100% correct, but because all we have are their public speeches and so on,  we still don’t know how they would have behaved in private. So in honour of them, we decided not to try and give them mannerisms that they don’t have,” Nobbs explains.

Ultimately it is words, dialogue and great themes that still ring true today that give The Prize Of Peace its power on stage. For Sejake, the power of the compromise that De Klerk and Mandela strike resonates today in terms of a need for the new leaders to “go back to the basics”.

“I think we’ve lost that connection with our ancestors,” he says. “We are intellectualising all of our arguments and we’re not going to the root cause; we are not looking at what we could have achieved if we all agreed to disagree.”

Nobbs echoes Sejake’s sentiments, saying that South Africans should see the play to see how the compromise that De Klerk and Mandela found within themselves has been somehow lost over the last 17 years.

“Despite all of the fights they had, they still stuck it out and   kept pushing forward,” he says. “That’s really the miracle, that none of these two men let their egos take over. They always kept the goal of a better South Africa in sight. And I think our present government needs to realise that it’s not about me, or Zuma or Malema, it’s about the people,” Nobbs says.

This article was first published in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Wednesday 7 September 2011.

The Prize Of Peace is on at the Old Mutual Theatre on the Square (www.theatreonthesquare.co.za), Sandton, until September 24.

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.

Musical mayhem

The ‘Offbeat Broadway’ original cast on remembering and reinvention 

The poster advertising Offbeat Broadway 4 makes the claim: “older, fatter, slower”, but I find exactly the opposite to be true when chatting to bubbly   original cast members Anton Luitingh, Lindy Abromowitz and Paul du Toit in a break from their hectic rehearsal schedule.

For a start, they are all glowing with enthusiasm and energy, so much so, in fact, that they immediately (and delightfully) drive the interview forward with their fond memories of shows long past and their experiences being back together performing  the hugely successful Offbeat Broadway.

“It’s so strange. That first day rehearsing together again was like grabbing that Eighties item of clothing out of the closet and thinking ‘actually, those torn jeans really work’,” quips a laughing Du Toit. “It all just fit and worked together perfectly, and we all remember why we chose to work together.”

In the six years that have passed since their last performance Luitingh jokes that Abromowitz and Du Toit  have been producing children (two each) while he has been forging forth with his career in musical theatre. Their lives and careers may have taken them down different paths – Abromowitz is a medical doctor by profession, Du Toit  is currently shooting a travel show called Rough Or Smooth – but Luitingh says he wouldn’t cast anyone else in the roles.

“It’s our different  personalities and voice types that made the piece work in the first place – that’s the magic that makes the show what it is. Change the cast, and you would have a completely different dynamic. I think that the show’s success is a combination of who we are, and also the fact that  in this day and age, people are looking for a bit of comedy and a good laugh,” he says.

Offbeat Broadway might poke fun at everything from Les Miserables and Phantom Of The Opera to Billy Elliot and Hairspray, but even though the songs are being turned on their heads, the power lies in the fact that they are  beautifully rendered nevertheless. Add to this the fact that SA audiences are more savvy when it comes to musical theatre than ever before, and you have a version of Offbeat Broadway that is stronger than earlier shows.  

"There has really been a shift in our audiences over the years,” Du Toit explains. "When we first started doing this, the Broadway shows weren’t coming to SA. All people knew about musicals was what they’d heard on CD recordings, unless they were fortunate enough to have  travelled to New York or London. Now, people have been exposed to so many Broadway shows – even the more niche market stuff – so it’s actually a lot more fun for us, because our audience has a greater knowledge of the material.”

Expect boisterous banter, local humour, musical genius and the oddball influence of hilarious director Alan Committie. Offbeat Broadway doesn’t miss a beat.

This article was first published in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Tuesday 26 July 2011.

Offbeat Broadway is on at the Studio Theatre in Montecasino from August 19 – October 2.  Visit http://www.montecasinotheatre.co.za/ for more information, or www.computicket.com to book tickets.

Activist art

Eve Ensler on the repressed girls within us all and the ‘huge vagina miracle’

Fifteen years ago, playwright and activist Eve Ensler liberated women through her renowned play The Vagina Monologues.  Her cheeky, provocative and inspirational script taught women to love and laugh at themselves again, and to embrace everything that being a woman entails. Now Ensler is doing it again, only this time she’s turning her attention to a younger age group with her play I Am An Emotional Creature.

“My intention was to kind of say ‘Okay, what if we got girls before they were muted and undone; before they were done in and went underground and became someone else?’” she says, in between munching ferociously on a chicken salad.

“What if we got them at the point in their life when they could actually be their fully voiced, powered and authentic selves? Most of us are climbing out of the chains or unbinding the chains or finding our voice after years of being muted; loving our bodies after years of hating our bodies, or getting ourselves out of horrible relationships or marriages where we have been abused or shut down. But I think if girls were free, maybe they wouldn’t have to go down that path, and they could be way ahead of us.”

Having recently undergone chemo and survived cancer, Ensler finds herself wanting to reach out and help women even more. Part of her drive as an activist she says comes from being close to death and feeling “connected on a deeper level with the suffering of the world”, and part of it stems from the abuse she herself suffered as a young child.

“I was very badly abused, and because of that I had two alternatives: go crazy and die, or become an activist and transform suffering,” Ensler explains. “Every time I do something that makes the world better for someone else, particularly a woman, I heal my own trauma and I feel like we heal the world.”

Just as The Vagina Monologues sparked the “V-Day” global movement to end violence against women and girls –   “one huge vagina miracle”, as Ensler fondly calls it –  I Am An Emotional Creature has given rise to the targeted “V-Girls” pilot programme, using an empowerment philanthropy model to provide young girls with a platform to get see their voices heard.

The play is composed of fictional monologues told by girls in various countries and contexts – from the Chinese factory worker making Barbies to the 15-year- old Bulgarian sex slave. It’s a powerful platform of voices demanding to be heard, that resonates as strongly with women as it does with young girls.

“We are all repressed girls. We all began as these wildly imaginative, powerful, emotional, devotional, intense and brilliant creatures, and then the world came and said, ‘Don’t be so intense, don’t be so emotional , don’t be this or that’,” says Ensler.

“I think where we overlap is that girls can free us. We shouldn’t be scared of our teenage daughters, we should be begging them to help us become liberated and to take us where we need to go. But I think what happens to most people is that we see our teenage daughters and we get panicked, because they remind us of our losses.”

Eve Ensler is in SA rehearsing for the first ever SA production of her hit script I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life Of Girls Around The World. It will be showing at the Laboratory at the Market Theatre form July 15 - 29. Visit www.markettheatre.co.za for more information.

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Tuesday 12 July 2011. Photos courtesy of Jennifer Esperanza.

Seriously funny stand-up

Top comedian Nik Rabinowitz hits Joburgers where it hurts – he’s talking  the ‘republic’ of Cape Town, emigration and, of course, Julius Malema

The newspaper backdrop to Nik Rabinowitz’s latest stand-up comedy stint hints at Serious Times, although you wouldn’t say so  based on the roars of laughter and outbursts of applause that Rabinowitz garnered after almost every joke.

Following a sold-out season in Cape Town, Rabinowitz successfully opened   You Can’t Be Serious in Joburg with the witty one-liners and spot-on facial expressions that have come to be his comedic signatures.

The key to his comedy is quite simply based on the old adage that the truth hurts – Rabinowitz condenses the current affairs of the week, the month or even the year and puts such a funny and frank spin on the facts that even the protagonists on the other end of his jokes would have a chuckle at the state of affairs in South Africa.

Rabinowitz expertly plays up the Joburg versus Cape Town dichotomy, peppering his favourite topics of emigration “down under” and  the 2010 Soccer World Cup in review with cracks about Helen “The Madam Cockroach” Zille and Cape Flats impersonations that absolutely undo his audiences.

He took a liking to one audience member in particular, the young 13-year-old Josh who was playing it cool, sitting alone in the front row while his parents were confined to the “cheap seats” in the back. Any political debacle that proved to be quite complex caused Rabinowitz to quickly cast his eye on the young Josh for approval. If the comedian was met with a blank stare instead of a smile – as was the case with Rabinowitz calling Malema a pot of tea that one sometimes needs to leave alone “to draw” – then Rabinowitz would promptly say “Google it Josh”, much to the youngster and many audience members’ delight.

Some of the highlights of the evening included  Rabinowitz’s harsh truths about what the likely South African  taxi airline is going to do to our skies, as well as his energetic rendition of various rugby and soccer sports commentators and finally his Survivor analogy of Mbeki  and how the “ANC tribe has spoken”.

Rabinowitz is intelligent, witty and exceptionally well versed in SA current affairs. He attacks everyone equally  – black, white, coloured, Indian, Muslin, Jewish – with the same stinging tongue and playful prod of humour, yet strangely  leaves them all feeling  optimistic and excited by the potential that this country holds. 

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Monday 11 July 2011.

You Can't Be Serious is on at the Market Theatre until July 16. Visit www.computicket.com to book tickets.