If I had a few billion rand to spare, I’d offer everyone in SA a chance to see RMB Starlight Classics — funding a continually travelling cast, crew and rig who would take joy all around the country. It wouldn’t be the most sensible way of spending the money, of course. Infrastructure, education, health, welfare: these are the priority areas.
I'm a materialist at heart. If I’d lived in 19th century Russia, among grim mustachioed intellectuals debating the eternal topic, “Boots or Shakespeare?”, I would probably have said boots. Living in a context of privation and inequality, of perpetual energy and fiscal crises, has the effect of underscoring this inclination. It’s not that art per se is a luxury; merely that large amounts of money spent on the arts appear to be an indulgence that the public purse (and most well-meaning private purses) can ill afford.
This is actually a false calculation, because there is consensus among researchers that the creative economy reproduces resources rather than absorbing them and generates jobs more efficiently than most other sectors. Art as a private investment, whether in value-accumulating objects or brand-building enterprises, tends to produce better returns than the bank or the stock market.
Nevertheless, you’d be hard-pressed to justify expenditure on the bells and whistles of a show such as Starlight Classics as a necessary public good. This is a pity, as we could all do with the shot-in-the-arm dose of affirmation that it is guaranteed to bring. Brilliant performers, fun musical mash-ups with invigorating arrangements, affable hosts, dancers, lighting and screen effects — it is an unashamedly celebratory and uplifting show.
As I joined a rain-soaked audience for Starlight Classics at Vergelegen Wine Estate last weekend, the gloomy skies offered rather obvious state-of-the-nation symbolism. But it was clear at the outset (resounding bars from the William Tell overture) that no pathetic fallacy would be allowed. And for the rest of the night the musical magic pre-empted any possibility of woe-are-we South African breast-beating.
A few thousand lucky Joburgers will have the privilege of watching Starlight Classics when it rolls into town later this year. But what about everyone else? Johannesburg, we are constantly being told, is the centre that cannot hold; the nation’s engine, in need of an overhaul, or a beating heart battling chronic arrhythmia.
If Joburg stands for the country, that metonymy extends paradoxically to the countryside. For so long, the urban-rural binary has been the foundation of South African discourses about inclusion and exclusion, opportunity and stagnation. That narrative is still dominant, but the boundaries between the two are not distinct, becoming increasingly merged through urban migration and city expansion.
This was brought home to me during a visit to the Fire Station in Rosebank, where Teresa Lizamore has curated work by three artists collectively connecting “rural” imagery to the alternating chaos and stillness of urban life.
Marina Walsh’s Sacrifice: The Intersection comprises a trio of figures carved from wood and bedecked with metal, concrete and clay. They are hybrids, the artist tells us, “like migrants integrating themselves into the fabric of a continually renewing city”. Walsh does not romanticise this process, but instead points to the clash between human and natural elements amid light, air and noise pollution: “Both sides sacrifice to coexist”.
Linda Rademan and Mandy Coppes-Martin’s Fibre Art collaboration expresses a different set of compromises and precarities. Rademan is more explicit in her (by turns poignant and satirical) representation of patriarchal violence; Coppes-Martin’s works in cotton and paper are more abstract and allusive, conveying fragile beauty but also an understated spectral menace.
Jan Tshikhuthula’s paintings, by contrast, convey a sense of resilience in the face of precarity — or, to put it a different way, dancing through the whirlwind. U Pembelela Shango / Celebrating the Land pays tribute to a “beautiful and idyllic place”, the village of Matshila near Tzaneen where the artist grew up. Yet his anthropomorphised windmills, losing their blades as they stride like giants across the landscape, also gesture towards a Yeatsian falling-apart.
Is this the ominous preface to a hurricane or the sign of a bright and playful future? The national zeitgeist suggests the former, but Tshikhuthula (no less than RMB’s optimism-generating musicians) leans towards something more hopeful.
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