Local talent drives 969 festival
JOBURG - Local super-talents Daniel Buckland and Nadine Joseph both star in moving performances at the 969-festival. Go and support them!
Melville’s Daniel Buckland and Emmarentia’s Nadine Joseph are set to heat up the stage in this year’s 969-festival.
969 – the stylish Joburg alternative to the National Arts Festival, showcasing some of the best of Grahamstown, is hitting the planks at the Wits Theatre on 15 July.
Buckland, having just heard that he’d won a Standard Bank Ovation Award for his show The God Complex, was charmingly enthusiastic when talking about his performance and the concept of the show.
The God Complex, directed by Sylvaine Strike, is about the premise that there is always someone above us, better than us. It was a sensation at the Grahamstown festival.
“It’s a play of our image on what God and man is,” Buckland said on 7 July in Grahamstown, where he was preparing for the National Arts festival.
“The play is about a man speaking to God, trapped in the beyond and trying to escape. When I was overseas touring with Cirque du Soleil I had this concept in my head. I wanted to use the physical theatre skills I had learnt with Cirque in the piece as well. It was just an idea, but I bought it to Sylvaine when I returned to South Africa. Sylvaine was the director I wanted to work with, and she fleshed it out so much and took it so far.”
Buckland and Strike wrote the piece together, and they’re clearly a crack team.
“I’m really thrilled about our Standard Bank Ovation award,” he said.
“And I’m really looking forward to 969, being on the stage in Johannesburg feels like coming home.”
The God Complex will be at the Wits theatre on Saturday 19 July at 6.30pm, Sunday 20 July at 2.30pm and Sunday 27 July at 2pm.
Nadine Joseph choreographed neither HEre nor there (and everythIng elSe), a physical theatre piece that deals with the transitory space of addiction. “It’s a dance work, and it offers a multi-layered vision of different perspectives on addiction,” Joseph says about the piece.
“It’s about before, during and after the process of addiction.”
Joseph was also the recipient of a Standard Bank Ovation Award in 2013. She’s in the piece herself, along with her cast, but she says she isn’t a dancer.
“What I do is body performance,” she offers.
“It’s about expressing yourself to the music. I’m really looking forward to performing at 969, it’s going to be spectacular.”
neither HEre nor there (and everythIng elSe) will be showing at Wits on Thursday 17 July at 6.30pm, Friday 18 July at 7pm and Saturday 19 July at 2pm.
