The Festival of Fame has been dubbed South Africa’s leading youth arts festival and showcases a number of stage productions, art exhibitions, installations and dances.
The five-day long arts and culture extravaganza was made up of more than 30 exciting parts.
City Buzz was invited to a showing of Roald Dahl’s insane version of Cinderella called Revolting Rhymes in the form of shadow puppetry, presented by the school’s art department.
“It took a good few months to put this all together. We started off by recording the track. We then had to select the music, then it was making the set and rehearsing. We have about 30 students working on this production,” said Anthousa Sotiriaoes, head of the arts department at NSA.
Another much-anticipated production was Dance Spectrum which was shown at Joburg Theatre to hordes of excited fans.
Manuel Norambuena, head of NSA’s dance department, explained that the children taking part in the multi-genre show of dance study their art – in theory and in practice – more than 10 hours each day in order to perfect everything they do.
“Every year that people see the production, they say that it’s the best they’ve seen. And we push our pupils to do better every year,” commented Norambuena as he described the dance production that includes dancers from Grade 9 to 12.
While the larger productions were put together by the heads of each department, the majority of the plays and dances were written, produced and choreographed by the pupils themselves.
With a number of sold-out shows every night, the festival could be considered nothing less than a complete success and the students had fun putting it together.
Details: www.festivaloffame.co.za
