In the end...

My home constantly looks like a dumping place for old newspapers. I keep on fighting the urge to pick them all up and dumping them in the closest skip. I collect them from family and friends, or I pick them up in driveways.

I fool myself into believing that I will read every single article on every single page eventually. Sometimes I sit into the wee hours of the morning devouring them… looking for clues… looking for the answers… looking for the “it” factor.

Those articles, I believe, might lead me to greater enlightenment, I cut out and paste into my “Cage Research” book with all the other phrases, thoughts, ideas and triggers that have been a part of this scripts journey.

I don’t do this because I don’t know what to say… I do this because I hope that I will come across that one line expressing what it is that I am feeling when I have not found the words to articulate it…

Everything is there, but it feels like the centre is out of focus.

Then I go and see HA!Man last week… Francois le Roux, an incredible musician, composer and entertainer, who love and embrace art in himself. A dedicated artist, devouring life. Somewhere in between the brilliance of it all I hear the words “In the end there is nothing left that you could describe with words.”

I dug a little piece of paper out of my handbag and scribbled it down… I knew it was beautiful. The more I marinaded on it this week, the more I realized that I don’t have a clue what it means… and then I finally went into an uncontrollable panic, coming to all kinds of wild conclusions and assumptions of what I think it means and how lost I really am in my mission to “describe with words”.

The panic and the clueless ness remains. So does the pile of newspapers.

All that I am hoping for is that they will be creating the roots through which this play will be nourished.

I salute you Brett Bailey!

Well now, isn’t that ironic… another incredible book found me in a small little charity bookshop in Durban. I was just browsing, not particularly looking for anything and definitely not hoping to find a rich source of inspiration to guide the writing of this play.

Yes, I am still writing… No, the play is not finished, yet… Yes, I am very aware of the fact that Grahamstown is in 128 days and that rehearsals will start in 48 days!!!

I perform under pressure! I perform under pressure! I perform under pressure! (I constantly remind myself...)

Back to this incredible book that found me… The Plays of Miracle and Wonder by Brett Bailey, published in 2003, about groundbreaking work he did in the previous 7 years.

I could just copy and paste the whole book right here… I could dedicate this blogg to the “miracle and wonder” of Brett’s work, but alas, I have my own journey and even with the deadlines drawing close, it is not the destination that is ultimately important here.

“During the creation process I rarely know what a play is about. The process of making it takes everybody involved on an intense journey: we are not social scientists who watch things unfold with detached interest; we are artists who have to dive right in and head for the whirlpools. We push deeper and deeper into the material and something forms itself out of our work; something is revealed; sometimes amorphous and shifting and awkward. Sometimes the difficulty of the subject matter and the struggle of our process are manifest in the knots and splinters of the product.” Pg 153

Brett , in my opinion, was always way ahead of his time. Which is why I follow in his footsteps, hoping to learn from him, more than 10 years after he did the work that I could only dream of one day doing.

The Photo Shoot

The photographer: me with a borrowed camera
The studio: a property just around the corner from my flat, which happened to be unoccupied and with a fence that happens to look like prison bars
The backdrop: an old red blanket that I grew up with… those really woolly ones with the satin lining, so popular in South African homes in the 70’s and 80’s; held up by my boyfriend who’s standing on a ladder.

Incredibly glamorous! We almost had a real studio set-up, with professional lighting to boot. Unfortunately we had to relocate the shoot to my flat when the sun disappeared behind the clouds with no inclination to be seen again.

I took about a hundred photos over two hours and though I am no professional I was really hoping that in the end of the day we would have some options to choose from, but as it turns out there really was only one… “Bongani rattling the cage.”

Bongani… calm, soft spoken, confident Bongani who looked at me from the other side of the fence and trusted me completely. Bongani who walked into my flat without seeing it and took a seat behind the piano to play the beautiful songs he taught himself…