Infecting the City The Arts Festival On The Streets Of Cape Town

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WORDS Harry Wise

The more accessible culture is, the more people it is likely to enrich. The very public ‘Infecting the City’ arts festival, which takes place at venues all over the centre of Cape Town, is a superb example of how culture, free and non-exclusive culture can make a city blossom on an average Tuesday afternoon.

Dancers from the Humble Heroes in action, wind blowing their skirts. Photo: Marijn Helms

The festival, which mainly consisted of interpretative dances, often performed in or against the backdrop of prominent Cape Town landmarks, brought joy to the many spectators who had gathered around to see the events. Lead around the city by a ‘lost family’, comically wearing surrealist masks, the festival comprised many beautifully choreographed dances, from Un-Mute, a dance exploring the nature of disability to Siyaba, a violin-accompanying contemporary dance staged by the Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative.

All the dances were beautifully choreographed and there was great diversity between each dance. The festival was not all about dancing though. There was puppetry, short films, choirs and other multimedia platforms.

Uneducated, which combined a projector displaying images of a person’s journey through education while interspersing a woman’s struggle through the education system was witty and brought many laughs from the crowd. Speaking of education, it was good for some performances to pedagogically try to challenge people’s views

The two Slinkie Lovers together with their newborn child, happily in love. Photo: Marijn Helms

on issues like race, disability, women’s roles and depression. Madness, a mixed media work which took place in Groote Kerk, was a particularly poignant piece as it wonderfully illustrated how depression hurts those with intelligence and hard graft. The combination of a choir, animated film and violins perfectly encapsulated the melancholic nature of the performance.

But by far, the most overtly political and one of the best pieces was the dance set Ababhidisi performed by the Conductors. Incorporating background music and Malcolm X’s ‘Message to the Grassroots’ as a soundtrack, the dance explored how when leaders suffocate people’s self-expression, people lose their identity and are lead down terrible paths. Malcolm X’s powerful oratory gave the dance a special dynamism which embellished the act as a whole.

One of the dancers from the Conductors, an angry look lingering in her eyes. Photo: Marijn Helms

A few acts did fall short of enjoyment. Spill just involved a woman, to mis-quote an idiom, drawing a line in the salt, and then pouring oil in the line. It was an uneventful performance. Neither were the Humble Heroes, an operatic trio interjected with tributes to historical South African figures, particularly worth seeing. The Video Art installation, which showed a series of short films as a gratitude to the drive-in cinema experience, had some forgettable shorts in it. Luckily, there was enough humour in the installation to compensate the bad clips.

I did not love everything about this festival, but it was a display of love that took my breath away. I found the ‘Slinkie Love’ display outside Cape Town station in the burning midday sun to be one of the funniest and most twee artistic endeavours I have ever come across. It was spellbinding watching two British people make two six-metre high slinkies perform acts of love that seemed so humanistic and enchanting. They even seemed to have sex and procreate a baby slinkie. It was impressive and bizarre at the same time. That is the best kind of art and that’s why ‘Infecting the City’ was so good.

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