Dear ITC,
I confess, I am mad about you.
As you have developed over the past three years you are one of the best things that has ever happened to Cape Town and to the milieu of the performance arts in Southern Africa.
You provide the very necessary alternative spaces for artists to make new and challenging work; work that often is immediate, fresh and thought-provoking. You expose and interrogate the complexities of urban life in Cape Town, unpack the trajectories and re-connect them to–and through passerby, performer, spectator; you reconstruct each and everyone as an artist; often through unusual, affective yet temporal displays of rhythm, time, love, desire, histories and uncertainties.
But, as much as you have developed, I fear you may paradoxically have regressed. As a spectator watching two collaborative works and two commissioned works, I came away feeling strangely distant and removed from the experience. I suspect that this mostly has to do with a lack of utilising visual spaces. What occurred was an enforced, flattened, horizontal, visual narrative. Works, that were collaborative and commissioned, were ‘presented’ to an audience. These presentations happened within a specified frame; very rarely did the frame break to expose the variegated spatial stratum in these city sites.
I think that the morning’s rewards were the inhabitants of the city themselves, who stopped, watched and interacted, and were consumed by the production, and for moments, everyone wanted to ‘dans’.
from Dr. Myer Taub, Postdoctoral Fellow, Research Centre for Visual identity and Design, University of Johannesburg
