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artsvark · 7 years

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Applications open for Emerging Theatre Directors Bursary 2017

The Theatre Arts Admin Collective (TAAC) is calling for applications for the 2017 Emerging Theatre Directors Bursary – in partnership with the Distell Foundation.

Ameera Conrad (director). Photo by Jesse Kramer

This year, TAAC are offering two bursaries to emerging Cape Town-based black women directors. Students at both an undergraduate and post-graduate level will not be considered.

As Caroline Calburn, director of TAAC, explains; “Young black women directors represent a small percentage of the overall profile of the Emerging Theatre Director’s Bursary (ETDB) winners over the last seven years. This has to change. There are so many astounding and highly talented black women with the potential to be groundbreaking directors. All they need is opportunity. May this bursary be the springboard to realise that.”

In Wag Van – Jason Jacobs directing Gerswin Mias and Courtney Smith – Photo by Jesse Kramer

The bursary was pioneered in 2010 and has since provided opportunities to nineteen young directors, most of whom are prolific directors making a wide range of work and winning numerous awards.

Notable winners include, Kim Kerfoot who won the Fleur du Cap Best Young Director for Statements After An Arrest Under the Immorality Act in 2013, Nicola Elliott who went on to win the 2014 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Dance, Khayelihle Dom Gumede who won the Naledi Award for Best Director in 2016 for Crepuscule, and Jason Jacobs, a 2016 winner, who has been named the Featured Young Artist for KKNK for 2017.

Previous winners of this bursary also include Amy Jephta, Tara Louise Notcutt, Pusetso Thibedi, Thando Doni, Alan Parker, Phala Ookeditse Phala, Bulelani Mabutyana, Mahlatsi Mokgonyana, Wynne Bredenkamp and Ameera Conrad.

My Children My Africa – Sihle Mnqwazana, Kate Pinchuck, Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi Mahlatsi Mokgonyana (director). Photo by Jesse Kramer

The Bursary offers emerging theatre directors a mentor, a small budget, a month’s rehearsal space, and a week of performance at the Theatre Arts Admin Collective. It is recommended that directors work with already existing scripts as the month-long period has proved insufficient for devised work.

Amy Jephta, the first recipient of the bursary in 2010 says the following about the opportunity; “It offers a new, young voice the chance to explore and create in an environment where there is no worrying about where the money will come from, which space will be used, or how the product will be sold. What I found most encouraging was the fact that, from day one of receiving this bursary, I was given free reign of the decision making process which would bring my play to life…. I was able to learn the nuts and bolts of the production process.”

TAAC is a busy and thriving centre where diversity is supported and celebrated. The same day could see a meeting with a distinguished veteran of the arts to a young director ploughing hard at her trade. This melting pot extends not only to experience but to culture and form too. The rehearsal spaces pulsate with variety – from dance and performance provocation to musicals.

“The Emerging Theatre Director’s Bursary is the only opportunity of its kind in South Africa, and for a young/emerging director that makes it exceptionally valuable,” says Kim Kerfoot, one of the 2011 winners. “It is a wonderful environment in which to find yourself, full of people that want you and your work to succeed, and are willing to do everything within their power to make that happen,” he adds.

The Bursary is specifically designed for emerging theatre directors who have had some experience in directing and who dream of a career as a theatre director.

The bursaries will take place between April and July 2017.

If you are an emerging black woman director and would like to seize this opportunity please submit a 1-page creative proposal, your CV (including two references with contact details), and an indication of your preferred date to [email protected] by Friday 10 March 2017. The bursary winners will be announced on Wednesday 22 March 2017. For enquiries call Caroline on 021 447 3683.

TAAC are hoping that during the course of the year, they will have raised sufficient funds for a further two bursaries. These will be opened up nationally to all emerging theatre directors.

Applications open for Emerging Theatre Directors Bursary 2017 was originally published on Artsvark

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parksquaretheatre · 8 years

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Falling Through the Ice with Athol Fugard

By Mary Finnerty, Director of Education and Director of Calendar Girls

As a young graduate student in the MFA Directing program at the University of Minnesota, I had the privilege of meeting and learning from Athol Fugard during an artistic residency. His passionate intensity, intelligence and humanity struck me deeply. He shared very personal stories about his work in theatre in South Africa, particularly about writing “Master Harold”... and the Boys. He said he was writing the play and it just wasn’t going anywhere.

The play is autobiographical, based on his relationship with two Black South African men who worked for his mother in a boarding house she ran to support the family. When Fugard was 17 and disappointed in his father, deeply angry, he took his anger out on this beautiful Black man who had served as a surrogate father by spitting in his face. Fugard kept trying to write the play without including that action in it. He told himself that it was a cheap theatrical trick to use such a gesture onstage. Soon he found himself unable to write until he faced the demon and wrote the scene. He said “my writing had been like so much skating, gliding along the surface and it wasn’t until I was willing to fall through the ice into the deep, dark, freezing water below that I could find the truth.”

I have carried that amazing lesson with me while working on every production I have directed the 25 years since he told me that story. And every time fear threatens to impair honesty onstage, I try to coax the cast to dare to “fall through the ice into the dark cold water below where we can find truth, clarity and beauty.” When I direct Calendar Girls at Park Square this spring, Fugard will be there, helping us to seek the truth.

#athol fugard #parksquaretheatre #south africa #mysaintpaul #mychildrenmyafrica

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parksquaretheatre · 8 years

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A Right Worth Fighting For

By Vincent S. Hannam

Whilst browsing the Internet this afternoon, taking in my daily quota of current events, I happened upon this video about South African students clashing with police to protest tuition hikes at universities.

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Students are violently protesting college tuition hikes.

As the cost for college in the U.S. skyrockets with no immediate solution in sight, why aren’t we rebelling en masse like the South Africans? I think I can speak for my generation when I say the cost of college is too damn high! I know education seems to always sit on the back burner in this country, but could South African society just really cherish education so much that they’re willing to risk their own lives for it? Well, as My Children! My Africa! at Park Square demonstrates - yes.

Every single person on this earth is entitled to education because it represents the key to unlocking the world-changing power in all of us. Perversely, it is because of this great power that those in control have always sought to limit its accessibility. Education is the great equalizer and the people of South Africa know this enough to realize that the price increase will only serve to shut out the country’s poor - a majority of whom are black. Now I am not suggesting a nefarious conspiracy by the country’s white elite to keep blacks out of college, but in a country continuing to heal from apartheid, this kind of division may not be a constructive step in the right direction.

Black or white, these students have every right to fight for an education that should be as accessible as possible. Clearly, the dots can be connected from the events unfolding in Johannesburg to My Children! My Africa! which premiered in that city in 1989. Then as now, the citizens of South Africa still have some hard questions to ask themselves but we definitely do too as we deal with our own education and racial disparities.

#MyChildrenMyAfrica #athol fugard #theatre #parksquare #twincities #mysaintpaul #onlyinmn

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