Athena Mazarakis is doing the second phase of Elev(i)ate,  “Elev(i)ate2″ between the 14th and 18th September, at 18:00 every evening at Wits as part of the 969 festival. It is a really really lovely piece that won a Silver Ovation Award at the Grahamstown festival this year.

Some of you know that Anton Coetzee, Jenni Lee-Crew and I (Tegan Bristow) were involved in the first one and I also helped, but very little, with the second phase. The second one takes the footage gathered in the first fully interactive performance and uses it in this “one man” piece in the most beautifully retrospective way and makes it into a whole new wonderful story.  (for those of you who are interested we used Aarduino for the design of the first interactive component.)

For the full 969 Program.

What the critics had to say:

“In delicate poetic interjections, she allows her words to trail off into gesture, mime and movement, which will make your heart sing.  This is one of those pieces that will shift your sense of status in the world, and leave you with an irrevocable lightness of step.” Robyn Sassen, Cue, 27^th June, 2010.

See Upgrade Joburg.

Murray Turpin in performance at the opening of his new exhibition at Artspace in Johannesburg, 10 August 2010.  Entitled "Triangulate the Death Rate", Turpin describes his solo show as  "a tale of death, love, politics, identity and geometry". He had painted the phrase, "blood is the new black" using his own blood shortly before the performance in which images from his paintings were tattooed onto his bare flesh.   Turpin’s paintings and mixed media works explore the existential implications of life in contemporary Johannesburg with a visceral harshness held in check by the artist’s strong graphic sensibility.  As stated in his exhibition manifesto:  "The truth and art may be of little consequence in the end with a gun to your head. Unseen moments, repressed memories. Blood is the new black".  The exhibition is only running until 17 August; so make a point of getting down to Parkwood to take a look.

_{photo by Christo Doherty}

In fact Manjoo is so enthusiastic about LISTSERVs that he asks all his readers to email him the name and topic of their favourite mailing lists so that he can promote them more widely.

What is a Remote Lecture? We are inviting people from across the globe to “beam in” to our seminar room in Johannesburg for a series of unique once a month lectures on arts, new media and technology practice.
These lectures are free and anyone can attend. Get inspired!

Remote Lecture 1:
The Choreographed Accident:how painting survived the accident  by Marcelino Stuhmer from University of Wisconsin Milwakee.

Date: 12 August 2010
Time: 19:00
For more information visit the Remote Lectures blog or contact me at tegan.bristow(at)wits(dot)ac(dot)za

The young South African composer, Clare Loveday, has recently been making waves with  her innovative compositions for saxophone orchestras.  Her works for 12 saxophones, Duodecet I & II were played at the International Society for Contemporary Music World New Music Days in Sydney and premiered at the Royal College of Music in London.  Loveday credits her experience of interdisciplinary collaboration, while she was a Music Lecturer at The Wits School of Arts, as a catalyst for the emergence of her mature compositional style. As she describes the experience to M&G journalist, Gwen Ansell, her early compositions were "fairly structured, conservative modernism" but her "breakaway from conventional composing`"  came through her collaboration  in 2006 with visual artist (and then WSOA Drama Lecturer) Gerhard Marx on the work entitled Collision. The work  used a wrecked car as a bizarre kind of a musical instrument, with Music students playing on fragments of cellos and violins that had been grafted onto the body of the wreck, "setting up  a relationship between sound and image that challenged the boundary between ’seeing’ and ‘hearing’."  Loveday concludes that the "Wits School of the Arts was promoting interdisciplinary work and we quite consciously wanted to push that as far as it could go." 

In varying ways, all of Loveday’s works represent Johannesburg.  In the same interview, she explains: "Jo’burg’s a place non-South Africans find hard to understand. It’s cosmopolitan, rich, poor, edgy, shiny, energetic, rough, dangerous and changing faster than you can blink. And it also has a neglected gentler, tender, more beautiful side.  I’m trying to represent all those aspects, mixed up and layered on top of one another."

^{Scenes from Collision by Clare Loveday and Gerhard Marx in the Substation Gallery, Wits School of Arts, October 2006. Photos by Christo Doherty}