CITY BREATH Festival of Video Poetry and Performance.
4 South African cities. 20 short experimental films. 4 minutes each.

Sat 6 November 2010, 8:00 PM
Sun 7 November 2010, 3:30 PM
Please note: the same films will be screened both shows.
The Bioscope, Main Street Life. 286 Fox Street, Johannesburg.

See the City Breath Project { blogspot }

WATCH THE TRAILER { HERE }
Tickets R 30 at The Bioscope Box Office.

Bookings: www.thebioscope.co.za
Location: Map

The basis for City Breath will consist of a collection of around 20 short video ‘breaths’ or ‘gasps’, conceptual pieces and brief emotional encounters with places that can not be expressed in the dominant mode of narrative cinema or television. These breaths or essences seek to interrogate the official understandings of our cities given to us in television, film and other mass media.

Interrogating, breaking and manipulating tired historical forms, City Breath seeks new forms, new film making strategies and approaches, new sound and image technologies, new aims and intentions in the tradition of the international avant-garde. It relates strongly the new short attention span cinema of the digital age and the skillfully produced low or no budget film. To this end, City Breath is facilitating and encouraging new collaborations between South African poets, performance artists, dancers, alternative filmmakers, experimental animators, sound and video artists, as well as curating submissions from established artists. The emphasis will be on the emergent genres of the video poem, the screen dance / performance and experimental animation. We will be looking for conceptual pieces that can hold the viewer’s attention.

As part of the launch of the Workers Museum in Newtown, there will be public Walkabouts through the new permanent exhibition.
Saturday, 6 March 2010.
There will be two Walkabouts offered, each going for about 45 min.
Times: 11:00 & 12:00.
After extensive restoration of the old Newtown municipal workers’ compound, the heritage site now opens as the “Workers Museum- A Site of Labour Migration“ to the public. The Walk About will be the first chance for visitors to experience the museum’s exciting new permanent exhibition on the history and rich heritage of migrant labour in Southern Africa.
Also for the first time the public can experience the recently built visitors’ centre that links the site museum with the Newtown Park. The launch of the Workers Museum is a joint project of the Johannesburg Development Agency, the City of Johannesburg’s Arts, Culture and Heritage Directorate, and Khanya College. The new museum is incorporated under MuseumAfricA.
Ex-residents of the Newtown municipal workers’ compound, which forms the centrepiece of the museum’s national heritage site, will be part of the guiding team.
Visitors will be able to ask ex-residents questions about their life at the compound:
What was it like to share a room with dozens of other workers and sleep on concrete bunks after a long day of work at one of the city’s municipal departments?
What was it like to live with men only, far away from their families, returning to wives and children once a year? How is compound life today?
Most of the ex-residents of the Newtown compound used to work for the Johannesburg Electricity Department and were housed at the 1913 opened compound until the early 1980s. Members of the permanent exhibition’s advisory team and the former Workers’ Library board, as well as Workers Museum and Khanya College staff will also be present at the Walk About. Any questions around the museum and its public programmes for 2010 can be asked.

About the Workers Museum and Heritage Site
The Workers Museum strives to keep the heritage of migrant workers alive and fill a gap in public memory. Like its predecessor, the Workers’ Library and Museum, the museum offers spaces for special exhibitions, cultural events as well as educational programmes around migrant labour for schools and the general public.
In co-operation with Khanya College, the Workers Museum aims to preserve and publicly promote the intangible and tangible heritage of labour migration in the Southern African region. It further will engage workers and the general public in participative heritage, memory and dialogue programmes that de-construct stereotypes, recognise diversity and contribute to social cohesion and the strengthening of cultural identities. Through the museum programmes historical and contemporary issues around the heritage of migrant labour shall be addressed in its complexity. The Workers Museum aims to preserve its national heritage site of the workers compound and white staff houses sustainably. The white staff houses, including the house of the compound manager, are situated North of the compound along Jeppe Street and include a row of domestic staff quarters. As a set, all three housing types, compound, domestic staff quarters and white staff houses are a unique symbol for the racial division of South Africa’s working class of the 20th century.
About Khanya College
Khanya College is an independent non-governmental organisation based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Established in 1986, the primary aim of Khanya College is to assist various constituencies within working class and poor communities to respond to the challenges posed by the forces of economic and political globalisation. In line with its objective to promote the heritage of workers Khanya has supported the then called Workers” Library and Museum since 1999. In 2006, it launched a memory and developmental heritage project to preserve and develop the tangible and intangible heritage of the Newtown municipal workers’ compound and white staff houses as the Workers Museum into a site museum of labour migration and, in co-operation with the City of Johannesburg and other stakeholders, worked towards its re-opening as the Workers Museum in 2010.
Event: Public Walk About at the Workers Museum – A Site of Labour Migration
Venue: The Workers Museum, Newtown Park
Date: Saturday, 6 March 2010

http://www.artlink.co.za/news_article.htm?contentID=24047

Gallery MOMO, The Zimology Institute and African Noise Foundation present VANDALIZIM.
Sunday 7 March @15h00 to 18h00.

Andrew Tshabangu’s images of the vandalism at the Zimology Institute will be on exhibit. Aryan Kaganof’s film “Exhibition of Vandalism” will be showing on one of the gallery walls while Zim and Kyle improvise in tandem to the video (Kyle will be playing of the vandalised piano). The poet, Frank Meintjies will be the speaker and there will be a documentary filmmaker recording the entire event.

VANDALIZIM is a healing ceremony performed by Zim Ngqawana and Kyle Shepherd in the desecrated body of The Zimology Institute.
The film of this event, THE EXHIBITION OF VANDALISM has been edited as a springboard to a further improvisation that will take place live in Gallery MOMO, in effect allowing for the duet of Kyle Shepherd (on piano and violin) and Zim Ngqawana (on woodwinds) to be mediated into a unique quartet, playing impossible combinations backwards and forwards through space and time.

This composition was inspired by vandalism on The Zimology Institute’s farm earlier this month. Two grand pianos were heavily vandalized and the building was stripped of all electrical connections and was left a shell.
Two pianos are played as found on the scene. Other items broken during the act of vandalism are also incorporated in the composition.
Filmed by Aryan Kaganof from African Noise Foundation, photographed by Andrew Tshabangu and coordinated by Zaide Harneker, this event is a fundraising effort towards rebuilding The Zimology Institute.
The Institute is grateful to all those participating in this fundraising event.
THE EXHIBITION OF VANDALISM
60 minutes. 2010

Please feel free to contact Gallery MOMO on +27 11 327 3247, or e-mail karen@gallerymomo.com. More information on the musicians and film maker are available on request.

We’re having a social night out at the theatre and would love you to join.

RSVP: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=267528071471

Tickets at the Market Theatre on a Tuesday evening are only R50 so hope it’s a good night for you join. Tickets through computicket or at the door.

Market Theatre Precinct
Tuesday 9 February
Parking: The Market Theatre parking is situated on Miriam Makeba street, Newtown Precinct. 011 832-1641 | http://www.markettheatre.co.za | Map

The show starts at 8, join at Kitchener’s Carvery for dinner from 6 onwards.
Kitcheners Carvery (at the Milner Park Hotel), Corner of Juta and De Beer, Braamfontein.

Songs of Migration
Market Theatre – Main Theatre
Tuesday 9 February, 8:00.
Songs of Migration, a musical tribute to the great songs of migrants across the African continent and tells stories about South African music and history, and promotes African music and dance. The production includes rich musical scenes on the train that was seen as a separator of lovers, breaking up families as it moved raw materials to and from the ports for imports and exports. This show is a musical celebration. We take off our hats to the musicians who captured this journey in song. It features songs by Mackay Davashe, Joseph Shabalala, Victor Ndlazilwane, Gibson Kente, Hugh Masekela, Dorothy Masuka and Miriam Makeba. www.computicket.com

If this particular show isn’t your cup of tea, then perhaps you’d like to join for dinner and then catch one of the other Market Theatre shows currenly on, also starting at around the same time and all costing R50.

The Pen
Market Theatre – Barney Simon Theatre
Tuesday 9 February at 8:15.
When you want to find the truth and finally get it, can you handle it?
Or will it drive you over the edge?
The Pen tells the story of a young playwright, Sipho, in the throes of writing a new play. Beset by writers block, the writer is lured into a seductive journey with his Muse, Thandi. The boundaries between fantasy and reality become blurred as he begins to live in an increasingly illusionary world dominated by his sexy, assertive writing goddess. www.computicket.com

Foreplay
Market Theatre – Laager Theatre
Tuesday 9 February at 8:15.
A modern South African adaptaion by Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom of Arthur Schnitzler`s play Reigen, about a series of ten love scenes of interconnected characters in different sexual situations. The setting is no longer Vienna during the 1890`s but the capital city of Pretoria in 2008. The whole adaptation revolves around the world of theatre – based on the two characters in the play the poet/playwright and the actress. www.computicket.com

http://www.markettheatre.co.za

As a social arts investigative endeavor Susan Woolf ‘s Taxi Hand Signs have been chosen as one of the themes for the 2010 Commemorative Stamp Issue. Woolf has also developed a tactile visual language of Taxi hand signs in a book “Taxi Hand Signs for the Blind”.

Join us in celebrating the launch of the 2010 Commemorative Stamp Issue and the Taxi Hand Signs booklet with an exhibition of the original stamp artworks by Susan Woolf.

Date: Friday, 29th January 2010
Time: 10h00 for 10h30
Venue: Standard Bank Art Gallery

Corner Simmonds and Frederick Street, Johannesburg click here for map
Please supply vehicle registration number when you RSVP for secure parking.

RSVP: Sara Woolf by no later than 25 January 2010.

WALKING TOUR - ‘FERREIRASDORP’

SATURDAY 23^rd JANUARY

St Alban's Anglican Mission Church, Ferreirasdorp, 1928

The oldest mining camp in this mining town.  It boasts 44 Main Street with its wonderful Art Deco windows and sculptures; an architectural masterpiece with a very long name – Transvaal Chinese United Club Mansions – the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court with a very shady past as well as the beautiful Church of St Alban’s, the cathedral for the “Coloured” Anglicans.  Ferreirasdorp has an extraordinary history from wagon tent town to forced removals and now it flourishes again with the brand new Zurich building.   No more dongas and trenches for the unwary, just the ubiquitous Jo’burg potholes.   It’s dramatic, it’s multicultural, it’s third and first world.  WOW!

MEET : Flo Bird and Dennis Adams
TIME : 14h00
PARK : Drive into town over the Mandela Bridge and keep straight on Ntemi Piliso (West) Street.  Turn right into Fox Street just before the Magistrate’s Court and cross Miriam Makeba Street.  The parking will be on your left.  Zurich has agreed to let us use their open parking in Fox Street between Miriam Makeba and Alexander Street.  Just beyond the Magistrate’s Court look out for the big security gates and blue shade cloth. Our cars will be safe and cool.
DURATION : Two and a half hours
COST : R55-00 for members and R80-00 for non-members
MAX No : 50

Book through Computicket

1st Quarter 2010 Programme

Wishing all a wonderfully creative 2010.