Jazzart celebrates 50 years of contemporary dance
THE Artscape Theatre is where dance enthusiasts will gather to celebrate the 50th anniversary of contemporary dance theatre company Jazzart.
The 50 Years of Dance Celebratory Festival features Jazzart students and professional dancers, and will include national and international guest companies and artists along with special guests from around the country.
The festival starts tomorrow and runs until October 14.
In the first week, Jazzart alumni Sifiso Kweyama, Celeste Botha, Elvis Sibeko and Shaun Oelf will showcase works alongside award-winning artists Vincent Mantsoe and Gregory Maqoma.
They will be joined by dance legend Sylvia Glasser and Moving Into Dance, one of the country’s oldest contemporary dance companies.
The programme includes short works created by graduates of Jazzart and an offering from the partnership between Jazzart and Unmute Dance Theatre, featuring a work by Andile Vellem and Yaseen Manuel.
Week two of the festival will feature a collaboration between Jazzart, the Cape Town Opera, Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra and the Phoenix Dance Theatre, which will feature the new critically acclaimed production of Requiem: Journeys of the Soul.
Choreographed and directed by Jazzart’s artistic director, Dane Hurst, with music by Mozart and Neo Muyanga, the production premiered in June at the Leeds Grand Theatre in collaboration with Opera North in the UK.
Mozart’s iconic masterpiece Requiem is performed with Neo Muyanga’s new work, After Tears, which has been described as an “invocation of South African rituals of mourning and remembrance – ultimately celebrating the beauty of life – colourful, joyous, uplifting: food for the soul”. Tickets to the 50 Years of Dance Celebratory Festival range from R100 to R150 through Computicket.
Master Class
Where: Adam Small Auditorium, Stellenbosch.
When: October 7–10.
If you missed out on Cape Town Opera and Pieter Toerien’s sold-out seasons of Terrence McNally’s Master Class earlier this year, the production will debut at the Toyota SU Woordfees in Stellenbosch this month.
Directed by Cape Town Opera artistic director Magdalene Minnaar, with musical direction by José Dias, the two-act play by the late Terrence McNally (Kiss of the Spider Woman, Love!Valour!Compassion!), stars Sandra Prinsloo as Maria Callas and features well-known arias by Verdi, Puccini and Bellini.
Master Class is a portrait of Callas in the context of the masterclasses she gave at the Juilliard School in New York in 1971, at a time when she herself had not sung in six years.
In the play she is seen working with three students – two sopranos and a tenor. Aside from her biting wit, she is often blunt and even harsh in her efforts to mentor and prepare the singers for the cut-throat world of operatic performance.
The play’s riveting theatricality is ignited by Callas’s emotional outbursts and the soaring arias performed under her guidance.
Tickets cost R200 at Webtickets.
An Intimate Evening With Shiraz & Friends In Concert
Where: The Drama Factory, Somerset West.
When: Tomorrow, Friday and Saturday at 7.30pm.
The band is comprised of two sisters, Anne Walsh and Helen Dooley, with Bob Walsh, Jarred Pitout (vocals) and Mike Prenter (guitar).
Anne, Helen and Bob are from the UK where they were part of the chart-topping family group The Dooleys.
After retiring to South Africa in 1982, they turned their talents to musicals for the local theatre.
For the Drama Factory concert, Shiraz have brought back their former guitarist Terry Weyer and enhanced the band with two more keyboard players, Estelle Louw and Allen Stidworthy, and drummer Chris Burgess.
Ticket are priced from R160 – R280. Book at www.thedramafactory.co.za or contact 073 215 2290.