NOT only will next year’s National Arts Festival in Grahamstown be a bumper one as it celebrates its 40th anniversary, but there will also be an unprecedented eight Standard Bank Young Artist Award winners setting performance spaces ablaze. Last week’s announcement of the 2014 recipients was, as usual, a memorable affair.
It’s customary for the Young Artist Awards to honour disciplines such as theatre, jazz, dance and visual art. But this year, for the second year running, there was also a prize for performance art, plus, for only the sixth time in the history of the awards, one for film.
The latter category winner is the most likely to cause a stir — but in a good way, because by crowning Jahmil XT Qubeka the 2014 Young Artist for Film, the festival committee has sent out an unequivocal message that artistic censorship will not be tolerated. It was Qubeka’s film Of Good Report that was banned — and subsequently unbanned — by the Film and Publication Board at this year’s Durban International Film Festival for so-called child pornography, without taking into account its artistic merit or the fact that the actress in question was in her 20s.
The other winners are Nicola Elliott for dance; Kyle Shepherd for jazz; brothers Hasan and Husain Essop for visual art; Donna Kukama for performance art; Njabulo Madlala for music; and Greg Homann for theatre.
They receive a cash prize as well as the financial backing to develop and premiere new works on the main programme of next year’s National Arts Festival.
These awards don’t randomly pluck artistic prodigies from obscurity and propel them to just-add-water fame. Each winner has already demonstrated his technical skills, creative talent and, most important, original vision over a number of years; they are no flashes in the pan. That’s why so many of the 130-plus alumni to date have used the award to scale greater heights, locally and abroad, including William Kentridge, Mbongeni Ngema, Janice Honeyman, Sibongile Khumalo, Johnny Clegg, Andrew Buckland and Darrell Roodt.
Congratulations should also go to Standard Bank, which has been sponsoring the awards for the past 30 years. The care and devotion with which the bank’s sponsorship of the awards has been managed is largely thanks to Mandie van der Spuy, who steps down at the end of this year.
I was particularly delighted by the recognition of Homann, whom I first encountered as a drama student at Wits University and who has since blazed a trail in his unassuming and affable yet unquestionably innovative way. His professional theatre productions have snatched two Standard Bank Ovation Awards, nine Naledi Theatre Awards and 34 nominations to date, and are often singled out for praise in the arena of cutting-edge work.
Formerly a lecturer at Wits — where he also met his mentor, Malcolm Purkey — Homann heads the school of live performance at AFDA Film School in Joburg, where he is busy beefing up the institution’s acting and musical performance component. At the awards, he also singled out Daphne Kuhn of the Auto & General Theatre on the Square in Sandton for her support over the years, Kuhn, an ardent advocate of new South African talent, has provided an artistic home for many of his endeavours since 2004, when he staged The Talented Mr Ripley at her theatre. Now we can surely start calling him The Talented Mr Homann.
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