Annual report: How weekly festival Black Labone saved the State Theatre [VIDEO]

The Annual Report on the South African State Theatre’s (SAST) 2023/2024 Financial Year was recently released and it explicitly shows how the theatre benefited from housing weekly music festival Black Labone.

This is after SAST’s Artist Director Aubrey Sekhabi openly admitted that Black Labone kept the national theatre alive months before the release of the Annual Report.

“You’ve kept us alive I must tell you,” Sekhabi told the Black Labone audience in August as the weekly Tshwane festival was celebrating its seventh anniversary.

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How Black Labone saved the State Theatre

Black Labone is an art movement from Tshwane hosted every Thursday. Last November it moved to the State Theatre after its previous venue, the African Beer Emporium (ABE), was shut down for business reasons.

“I’m sure you’ve read about us in the newspapers when we had fraud of R24 million. We were broke for a better part of last year. We were broke for the better part of the first quarter this year, but Black Labone kept this institution going because you were here,” said a buoyant Sekhabi at the time.

In 2023, a 41-year-old former SAST employee and four accomplices were arrested following an investigation by the National Serious Corruption Investigation team.

The allegations in this matter relate to money laundering, fraud and theft that took place at the SAST which was reported on 4 November 2018.

It is alleged that two employees from SAST siphoned money for their own personal gain as they flouted the supply chain processes.

The two employees allegedly utilised letterheads of existing companies to create invoices without the knowledge of the actual companies but changed the banking details to those belonging to the suspects’ relatives, resulting in the total amount stolen of R24 million.

Following the release of the report, The Citizen reached out to the SAST to which they acknowledged and committed to answering the questions.

The theatre is yet to respond to the questions, despite being provided with a requested extension of the deadline.

After Black Labone’s move to the theatre, Sekhabi confirmed to this publication that they signed a contract with the organisers of Black Labone, to host the weekly event until the end of November that year.

ALSO READ: Black Labone: Pretoria’s abode for artists celebrates six years

The Report’s findings

The Annual Report serves as an instrument of accountability to the shareholders and the people of South Africa.

It was been prepared by management and approved by Council, in accordance with the Cultural Institutions Act (Act 119 of 1998, as amended in 2001) and the Public Finance Management Act.

The Report reveals that there has been an increase in audience attendance and online streaming views at SAST since Black Labone’s arrival.

In terms of revenue generation, the report averred that while the annual revenue target for ticket sales and theatre rental revenue was not achieved, the value of revenue receipted was significant at R7,049,935. The Parking garage revenue (R8,018,121) and Front of House revenue (R3,468,826).

“Both significantly overachieved their annual targets by 78% which may be attributed to the significantly higher audience attendance recorded during the year which directly supports both revenue streams.”

“In particular the new partnership production, Black Labone, has attracted a large number of audiences which contributed to the overachievement,” read the report on the theatre’s Front of House revenue.

With Black Labone being streamed each Thursday, this has also helped the theatre in reaching its targets for streaming.

“Large number of audience attending the new partnership programme; Black Labone, together with a large number of audience attending theatre rentals focusing on school-related productions as well as a large number of school children attending the SAST set-works productions has contributed to the overachievement.”

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Pulling in numbers

In total, 130,145 audiences attended productions and related events compared to the target of 100,000 for the year.

Black Labone attracts between 500 and 1000 people on a weekly basis.  Their annual anniversary celebrations, dubbed the Earthday celebrations, can pull an audience of just more than 4000 patrons.

“We estimate we might have had up to 4000 people in the last Earthday celebration,” Black Labone co-founder Izah tells The Citizen.

The Earthday celebrations in August saw a trio of stages placed in different parts of the theatre, each attracting eager music lovers. Other attendees were loitering around the book, food, art and clothing stalls.

In his preamble in August, Sekabhi said the theatre took the decision to abandon shows on Thursday evening because of how packed it gets on the day.

“So we shut down all our performances in the evening. Four theatres,” said Sekhabi emphasising the separated space in the eastern bloc of the theatre that is set out to accommodate Black Labone.

The four theatres Sekhabi refers to are the Intimate Theatre, the Sibusiso Khwinana Theatre, the Arena Theatre and the Drama Theatre. These are four out of the theatre’s six stages that are closed down for Black Labone.

“We said we’re not gonna have performances in these theatres because we don’t want someone who comes here and didn’t know what was happening and they go home and they write trash about us.”

ALSO READ: Folklore Festival kicks off at Black Labone’s Earthday celebrations at State Theatre

Black Labone’s hopes

Izah said they were pleasantly surprised by the report’s findings but said they were yet to speak to the SAST about the nature of their relationship going forward.

“We can actually admit that as an organisation we’ve made multiple strides since we joined the theatre,” Izah told The Citizen on Friday.

“A lot of staff and team members at the State Theatre did mention on a couple of occasions that Black Labone was a shock to the system. It was different from anything they had seen before,” he said.

Izah describes Black Labone as a “glorified jam session” because patrons don’t pay a cover charge at the door, except a donation, and nor do the performers get paid a booking fee.

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Because of this, Black Labone hasn’t been able to book certain artists because they can’t afford them or those artists aren’t willing to perform pro-bono. He hopes that the theatre can help in this regard moving forward.

“We do wish for the State Theatre to assist us in securing the artists our audiences would like to see at Black Labone,” Izah shared.

Black Labone has collaborated with other festivals, where they would have a stage named after their movement.

Their consistency of putting together a weekly show that attracts throngs of music lovers has prompted calls for Black Labone to have its own annual festival separate from the weekly instalment.

“It’s definitely something we’ve been working on. We’ve been regarded as the weekly festival. We would like to host one that is on a bigger scale. We do have dreams of setting up a really lovely festival in the city, in Pretoria, running over multiple days.”

“But we want to do it right,” concluded Izah.

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