LIZA'S BACK, NOT AS A DANCER BUT AS A PAINTER OF DANCE

      LIZA'S COMING BACK TO HER FIRST LOVE, PAINTING

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 20 November 2021)

For many years, Liza MacKay was best known for being Nairobi’s leading modern dancer, instructor, and choreographer. She taught dance at Alliance Francaise and choreographed musicals for Phoenix Players like ‘Sweet Charity’, ‘Joseph and his Amazing Technicolored Dreamcoat’ and even Shakespeare’s ‘Taming of the Shrew.’

But back when she’d completed her A-levels at Kenya High, Liza didn’t go study theatre or dance. She went to perfect her skills as a painter at St. Martin’s School of Art and Sussex University in the UK.

That’s how she came around to teaching art at ISK for a quarter century up until a few years back. It’s also what brought her back to being not just an instructor but a practitioner of painting.

Nonetheless, her upcoming exhibition at Red Hill Gallery will be all about the career that brought her tremendous joy for many years, and that was dance.

Having taken ballet lessons as a child, she came back to studying dance while still in art school. That led to her dancing professionally with UK companies like ‘Moving Vision’ and the ‘Dance Theatre Commune’.

But when she got a call from one dance instructor in Nairobi, suggesting Liza come home to take up her teaching job at Alliance Francaise, Liza confessed she’d been missing Kenya terribly and quickly flew back to teach dance and to choreograph shows for James Falkland and others.

She also performed in everything from Brecht’s ‘Mother Courage’ to Baudelaire’s poetry, accompanied by Job Seda aka Ayub Ghada, and Alliance Francaise’s former director, the late Pierre Comte.

But since she stopped teaching both painting and dance, Liza has come back to fine art.

‘Choreography’ is what she’s entitled an exquisite collection of figurative paintings of a dynamic dancer in motion. Mind you, painting provides a two-dimensional perspective but dance is all about movement of human bodies in 3D.

Liza has her own unique techniques for conveying the vitality of the dancer, who in this case is her former colleague, Adam Chanjo, who came to teach dance to deaf students at ISK.

“We’ve remained good friends, so when I thought of painting a subject close to my heart, I thought of dance. I wanted this show to make the connection between these two [artistic] aspects of my life,” Liza tells BDLife as she puts finishing touches on paintings that she’s produced during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Combining photography, painting, and even photoshop, Liza’s one-woman show is all about one dancer who we encounter, first in a portrait that she painted of him, then on a beach at the Kenya Coast on a sunny day when the water is crystal blue and the sky is shimmering with heat and ethereal blue light.

And finally, her most recent version of the dancer is most ambitious. She initially took a series of photographs of Adam in specific poses that she wanted him to hold. Then she photoshopped them to create a variety of effects, all aimed to emphasize both the dynamism of the dance and the graceful elegance of the dancer.

When her exhibition opens early next year, Liza has arranged for Adam to come and dance while she tells a bit more about his story as well as about her art.

Liza will be adding more paintings to the collection that I saw tucked away in her home. But thus far, it’s her portrait of Adam that I feel is the best reflection of her skill as a first-class portrait painter who manages to convey the essential life force of her subject with sensitivity and clarity.

Her studies of mobility and grace of the dancer are also interesting; the paintings of Adam on the beach are presented as if his form is a beautiful still life, bronze and sun-baked in the sand.

Her choice to slice several poses of the dancer to create a semblance of cinematic movement doesn’t quite work for me. My eye is more inclined to look for the original dancer and try to piece his body back together again. Instead, Liza’s intent is to convey a feeling of dynamic movement that’s accelerated by her slicing and reshaping of body parts.

But whether her dancer is slightly distorted or presented in elongated ballet-like forms, it’s the elegant anatomical accuracy of Liza’s presentation that makes her paintings feel almost super-realistic.

This will be the first one-woman exhibition that Liza has had in several decades. Clearly, it is long overdue. We hope it will signal more to come from this multi-talented Kenyan woman.

 

CYRUS KABIRU: GIVING TRASH A SECOND CHANCE

CYRUS HAS GIVEN TRASH A SECOND CHANCE FOR YEARS

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (published in Top 40 under 40 Nov.19, 2021)

Cyrus Kabiru was in Venice, Italy last week when two of his sculptures were selling at the Art Auction East Africa for more than KSh1.2 million.

“It was important that my work be in the auction, but not important that I be there,” said the 36-year-old globe-trotting Kenyan artist.

What was also important to this self-taught sculptor and painter was that the funds raised would go a long way to building up the Art Orodha Centre that he’d established in 2019 outside Nairobi to provide space for young artists to work, learn, share ideas, exhibit their art, and sell it at the same time.

Cyrus had been invited to Italy to speak to students from several Italian universities about his favorite topic, “Giving trash a second chance”. The subject as well as the speaker have attracted so much interest that he’s been invited with his art, to speak or hold workshops everywhere from Cape Town, Milan, Dubai, and Amsterdam to Hong Kong, Harlem, Hollywood, and Washington, DC.

For a young man who was born and raised just next to the Dandora dump in Korogocho, Cyrus’s journey was fueled by his artistry and his desire to be best at whatever he did. Knowing at a very early age that art was what he wanted to do with his life, the only art materials he could afford were foraged from the city dump.

“People ask me if I was inspired by Picasso or Warhol. I tell them I never heard of them until I left Kenya,” says Cyrus whose C-Stunner eyewear was inspired by his father’s glasses, specks his dad never allowed him to try on.

“So I decided to create specks of my own,” says the artist whose whimsical C-Stunners have been written up everywhere from New York Times to CNN to Art in America.

Cyrus may not be the first African artist to recycle urban trash and transform it into treasured items, including everything from jewelry to sculptures to monumental tapestries. But his message of seeing trash from a fresh perspective, in terms of how it can be resurrected into something dynamic, useful, or even beautiful, is reinforced with his quirky art.

For years, Cyrus was based at Kuona Trust where he initially worked with bottle-tops, wires, clippers, and plyers to create life-sized creatures. He also drew caricatures and cartoons which were initially what took him to the Netherlands for his first exhibition overseas.

But with the success of his C-Stunners, he moved out in order to begin building the art centre which eventually became Art Orodha (or Trush Art). “I want younger artists to benefit from what I have learned,” says Cyrus who keeps a low profile here at home but is closely observed by art critics overseas.

The fact that his Blue Mamba bicycle sculpture sold for over Sh820,000 and his Radio sold for over Sh410,000 shows that even locally, Cyrus’s art is appreciated by those who understand works like his can only accrue in value over time. And Cyrus’s time is now.

GERMAN PHOTOGRAPHER CAPTURES MEMORABLE MOMENTS IN REGION

             UNFORGETTABLE MEMORIES CAPTURED IN PHOTOGRAPHS

                                                                                  Christine by Sonke C. Weiss

By Margaretta wa Gacheru

German photographer, writer, journalist, and filmmaker Sonke C. Weiss has spent the past 25 years traveling and working in Africa. In all that time, his camera has been close at hand to capture memorable moments. Many of those images have earned him international awards.

But they also reflect what the photographer calls “unforgettable memories”, a few of which he’s currently exhibiting at Red Hill Gallery in a show he entitled “All that I can’t leave behind.”

His exhibition opened last Sunday, November 14^th and runs until January 9^th next year. Its title suggests he has a deep attachment to the places, people, and memories each image represents. It also implies that for all the decades he has been in Africa, working everywhere from Uganda, Ethiopia, Tanzania, South Africa, and Kenya, he is still something of a stranger in the region however rich his experience has been here.

The exhibition itself is honed down from his huge collection of photos taken since the 1990s when he first came to Africa for an “adventure” and for “kicks’.

“I’d yearned since childhood for the kind of adventure I’d found in my Tintin comic books,” he wrote in his artist’s statement. “I wanted to see the world. I wanted [especially] to see Africa.”

Getting a job as a communications officer with the humanitarian aid NGO, World Vision, enabled him to work in several trouble-spots in the region, including northern Uganda.

“We had a rehabilitation centre in Gulu for child soldiers who’d been rescued from the Lord’s Resistance Army,” he recalls. One of those child soldiers named Christine is in the exhibition. Hers is one of the three collage portraits that Weiss created to compliment the 30 photos in the show.

“I also wrote a book on child soldiers, focused in Christine’s life story,” he says. “She was able to accompany me on a book tour in Germany which was quite successful,” he adds.

What he calls his favorite photo in the exhibition was also shot in Gulu. It’s of a woman street-food vender at the end of her working day. She’s packing up her cooking pots and tea kettles. But Weiss says what appeals to him about the shot is the way her pose looks as graceful as that of a ballerina.

There are other elements of the image that are striking: the texture and weather-worn color of the tall wall in the photograph; the balance of simple elements hanging from the wall; and the way the photograph itself looks almost like a hyper-realist painting.

The one other photo from Uganda that grabs one’s attention is another portrait, only this one is of a business woman surrounded by huge gunia (hessian) sacks filled with charcoal. Having a personal concern for trees and the acute problem of deforestation, I find the image painful in its implications. But it is eloquent in its ability to visually narrate a complicated story about trees and Ugandans’ need for energy irrespective of the long-term implications of destroying Africa’s rainforests.

All of the images in Weiss’s exhibition have that narrative quality. He has two photographs taken in Tanzania during the pandemic and hung almost as if they were a diptych. In one, the young woman wears a mask; in the other the young mask-less man looks embarrassed with his hand over his mouth.

                                                                            Charcoal Mama 

“You remember how the former leader of Tanzania opposed masks, but things changed with the change of leadership,” Weiss says.

But it’s on the gallery wall where Weiss, with the Gallery’s owner-curator Hellmuth Rossler-Musch, hung over 20 of the photographer’s smaller images that one will see how intimately he got to know the non-touristic life of African peoples. For one thing, there isn’t one zebra, elephant, or lion in the whole show. Only African people living in families, often in informal settlements, and reflecting less on the poverty of the people and more on the aesthetic elements of what he sees.

Critics of Weiss’s exhibition might see it as a white voyeur’s perspective on poverty in the Africa. And yet, the photographer has initially gone to all those countries on a mission to assist. In the process, he has witnessed people’s everyday lives, like the lady street vender and the former child soldier.

Some of Weiss’s photos that couldn’t find room in this show were shot in Kibera where he was covering a COVID-awareness campaign designed by artists from the Maasai Mbili collective.

“They painted walls that said, BEWARE COVID, and the community took note,” he says, clearly impressed with the M2 initiative.

B2B

                    BACK TO BASICS’ COMEBACK WITH DISTURBING DRAMA

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 15 November 2021)

Back to Basics has got to be one of the most edgy and experimental theatre companies in Kenya. That is why we had such high expectations of their return to the stage earlier this month. Needless to say, some B2B fans were stymied to find the Jain Bhavan Temple where ‘Breathe III’ was happening, but the public persevered and fans came out in record numbers.

As with the performances of Breathe I and Breathe II, Mbeki Mwalimu assembled a series of quirky true Kenyan stories, collected and narrated by journalist Jackson Biko, to create Breathe III. Mbeki both curated the stories and directed the show.

Presented as a series of animated monologues, B3 generally focused on relationships, mostly unsatisfactory ones between women and men.

                                           Nick Ndeda hugged by Gilbert Lukalia in previous B2B production.

Yet one of the most engaging tales of the five who are traveling by train from Nairobi to Mombasa, is about a guy struggling to stay alive in the slum. Brio, according to Nick Ndeda, didn’t have a problem with women. His primary concern was surviving in light of the poverty and violence he incurred on a daily basis in Kibera. Ndeda, like the other four storytellers, went into graphic detail about gritty struggles that made their stories so incredible.

What made Ndeda’s Brio such a compelling character is not just Biko’s depiction of the risky business of Brio’s not getting raped, robbed, or killed every day in the slum. It’s the way Ndeda grabbed his character and got physical with his portrayal of this boy who eventually would become a prize-winning boxer.

It's the one happy ending in the show. The rest are bitter-sweet affairs, except in the end when Nick and Martin Githinji stand up to try to defend men in light of the tales told by three powerful women actors who have deep grievances with men, starting with Mary Mwikali.

                               Mbeki Mwalimu in previous B2B production with Mary Mwikali and Wakio Nzenge

Mwikali gives us some of the lighter moments of the show, especially when she asserts her own agency in admitting she’d been shamelessly addicted to sex for three years! She tells her story to total strangers who, like us, are fully swept up in her charismatic portrayal of a woman daring to overthrow her frustrations with men by taking charge of her relationships and thus her life. Mwikali’s capacity for making us laugh and cry with her character is one of the gifts of Breathe 3.  

Unfortunately, Shazmeen Bank’s character has been wounded so deeply by her man that she can only express herself as a victim of her spouse’s alcoholism, womanizing, and psychological abuse. Unlike Mwikali’s character, she’s wholly oppressed by her spouse, thus making her piece the most painful in the show. Her latent rage comes pouring out as the train passengers slept. Apparently, hers is an internal monologue drafted in a letter she had written to the guy. Ultimately, her reality is that she’s stuck in a rut like so many married wives, seething with silent rage, who suffer in silence and can’t find their way out of their victimhood.

In yet another contrast, Wakio Ndenge’s character is a fighter whom we initially meet, not in the train but in front of the main stage curtain, musing on her miseries. The train has evaporated from the scene, so this is the most surreal episode. Domestic violence is again a theme running through her tale, but it’s preceded by her thinking about an abortion she has had and the feelings of guilt and low self-esteem that followed that decision. It isn’t quite clear why her man shows up at that moment, but she and Ndeda get into both a verbal and a physical brawl that looks deadly. Fortunately, she survives but the message is plain: women have major problems with men.

Yet once we get back to the train, it’s as if nothing had happened the whole night. All three women disembark while only Ndeda and Martin Githinji are left to a quasi-rap rendition of what makes a man. They’re made to look slightly absurd as a defense of the male, especially after all we have heard. But the tragicomic tone of their dialogue tops off a tale that paints an unhappy portrait of not just spousal relations. We also detect a broader, unsettled undercurrent in Kenyan society. It’s sadly polluted with violence, injustice, and impunity which has seeped into the deeper dimensions of people’s personal lives.

Breathe 3 was a painfully disturbing show to watch but it’s also a provocative one, poignantly told by a team of some of Nairobi’s most talented actors.

 

 

ART AUCTION EAST AFRICA GARNERED SH23.1 MILLION

 HYBRID ART AUCTION EARNS MILLIONS

By Margaretta wa Gacheru

The 9^th Art Auction East Africa garnered a whopping Sh23.1 million last Tuesday night at the new Radisson Blu Arboretum Hotel. That was in spite of COVID keeping a few friends of the Auction away from the ‘real time’ event.

But not even COVID could keep serious bidders from buying E.S Tingatinga’s Untitled ‘Rhino’ for Sh3.1698 million, Geoffrey Mukasa’s Untitled ‘Blue Beauties’ for Sh2.632 million, Salah El Mur’s “Iris Flower’ for Sh1.566 million, or even having a bidding ‘war’ over Ehoodi Kichapi’s ‘Man against City’, the winner paying Sh1.5262 million for the oil on canvas Basquiat-like work created by Kichapi in 2008.

Other notable sales included ‘’A Kiss’, the second Tingatinga painting created by the late Tanzanian artist which went for Sh1.0566 million, Peterson Kamwathi’s ‘Monument II’ for Sh798,320 and Cyrus Kabiru’s ‘Blue Mamba’ bicycle sculpture that sold for Sh821,800 which will be donated to Kabiru’s Art Orodha Art Centre. Cyrus’s was one of two donations made by artists together with Circle Art Gallery. The other one was by the Ethiopian artist, Tamrat Gezahegne whose painting, ‘Adorned Body’ sold for Sh493,080, all of which will be donated to the African Arts Trust. And lastly, the other donated item that got auctioned off last night was a rare bottle of 26-year-old Glenfiddich whiskey which went for Sh50,000.

In fact, this year’s art auction was a hybrid affair, meaning bidders were not only able to vie for their favorite art pieces in person with paddle in hand. They could also call in by phone, although that method has mostly been used by international bidders. They could even bid online through the popular art auction platform, Invaluable.

“That’s what we did last October,” Danda Jaroljmek told BDLIFE a day before the auction. “It was the first time we put the auction online and it worked very well,” added the founder-curator and executive director of both Circle Art and the Art Auction East Africa.

The October auction was an experiment of sorts, given the lockdown was still on. But it proved that art lovers and prospective buyers didn’t need to be on hand to physically witness Kenyan auctioneer Chilson Wamoja handle all the lots of East African art (60 last Tuesday night) to take part in it from the comfort of their own living room or bedroom.

Like so many businesses that had found COVID to be both a curse and a blessing in disguise, Danda and her team had to learn lessons and new ways of working during the pandemic.

“We were heading in that direction [of online auctioning] anyway, having seen how all the major auction houses, from Bonham’s to Sotheby’s, have been holding their auctions online for quite some time,” she observed.

Nonetheless, October was a revelation that opened eyes to the immense possibilities of conducting last Tuesday night’s hybrid auction.

“We now have more bids coming in from all over the world,” said Chilson who’s been conducting the auction for the last six or seven years. “We’ve always had international bidders, but the numbers have increased in the last couple of years,” he added.

Putting the Art Auction East Africa on the Invaluable online platform is one factor that’s widened global awareness of East African art. It also allowed anyone who’d registered with Invaluable to watch the entire auction last Tuesday and place their bids online in ‘real time’.

“We’ll have Don [Handa, Circle Art’s gallery manager] at the website watching the bids come up at Invaluable,” explained Danda. “He’s the one who’ll pass the online bids onto Chilson who will also have to watch the phone lines as well as the bidders in the room [at Radisson Blu].”

But Chilson didn’t complain. He merely mused on the probability that if they’d gone online with Invaluable sooner, so many more art lovers might have switched onto East African art.

Danda also said she’d seen a steady increase of interest in East African art since the auction took off back in 2013. That interest has increasingly come from all over the world.

“Let’s see, we’ve heard from Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa as well as from Switzerland, France, Germany, UK, US, and Australia, and also Qatar and Dubai,” Danda recounted.

When asked by BDLife what she thought had caused the exponential increase of interest in regional art and the auction, she said there were many factors. One was signing on with Invaluable since many serious art collectors and investors are aware of website and follow it closely. “We also signed on with Artsy [another leading art news online platform],” she added

Another factor, she said was social media, and the other big issue was the global trend of increasing interest in African art.

“There is little doubt that [art lovers] are following global trends in contemporary art,” she said. “Previously, it was Chinese art, then came Indian art, and now, there’s new interest in African art. It’s definitely had an impact on our work,” she added.

According to the local art collector and investor Tony Wainaina, Africa has gained greater attention in the global art world because it’s accurately seen as “the last frontier” for exploring contemporary art.

Noting that not a week goes by without calls coming in from new voices expressing interest in East African art, Danda added that art fairs have also had an impact in raising awareness that East African art exists.

In the last few years, she [often with her assistant Don Handa] has attended a score of art fairs, raising the profile of contemporary East African art in the process. “Right now, we have a presence in art fairs in Paris and Dubai. And we just finished another one in London where works by Dickson Otieno, Shabu Mwangi, Tahir Karmali, Jackie Karuti as well as several Ugandans and Sudanese all did well,” she said, noting that all of Otieno’s wire-weave sculptures were sold.

The only problem with Tuesday night’s art auction was that the room at Radisson Blu Arboretum Hotel wasn’t nearly as big as the Upper Hill RB ballroom which had been shut down months ago due to the pandemic.

“The room could only hold 29 of the 60 lots that can be found in the auction’s [elegant full-color] catalogue,” said Don Handa who had an ‘army’ of young Kenyan volunteers to work with on Tuesday night, assisting as ushers and caretakers of the art.

“We knew in advance that the room size would be comparatively small, which is why we’d encouraged everyone who was interested to come see the [auction] preview at the gallery,” Danda added.

But then, everyone who signed up with Invaluable was able to see all of the artworks as Chilson conducts the bidding “in real time.” And even those who attended the event in person, were able to see all 60 lots flashed on three white walls as he auctioned off carefully curated works of both paintings and sculptures.

SECONDARY MARKET

Circle Art’s AAEA catalogues is full of detailed information about the art and the artist. It also mentions who has the provenance or prior ownership of a work and whether it has come from a private collection or directly from the artist him or herself. Danda said nearly two-thirds of the works auctioned Tuesday night came as part of the secondary market.

“Technically, most art auctions only include works from the secondary market,” says Danda, who from the beginning has included original works coming from the artists themselves. Among them were several well-known local artists, including Sane Wadu, Cyrus Kabiru, Edward Njenga, Kaafiri Kariuki, Tabitha wa Thuku. Ehoodi Kichapi’s ‘Man against City’ came to Circle as part of the secondary. But either way, his painting surpassed all expectation in sales and elicited one of several dramatic bidding battles between those physically at the auction and those who were either online or on the phone.

But for Danda, including art that comes from the artist is meant to nurture local talents as well as to cultivate a secondary market. “One way to promote the idea of art as a valuable investment is to cultivate a dynamic secondary market where collectors can come sell their art and make a profit,” she explained.

For Tony Wainaina, more nurturing of the artists is needed to develop the local art scene further. “We need more art dealers, agents, and first-class galleries,” he notes.

But his other concern is the fact that there are many moneyed Kenyans who could easily be investing in East African art who don’t. ‘These are people who still hang calendars on their walls is if they are works of art,” he said in a phone interview shortly before the auction.

“They need to learn there are other things to invest in besides land and shares,” said Wainaina.

That may be the case, but Danda says she has seen many more Africans, including Kenyans, buy art now than in the past. One reason for this is the internet and social media which has roused more interest among both local and more Pan-African audiences.

Tony concedes that young Kenyans who have been abroad and gotten exposed to the international art world are more likely to attend an art auction and fill their walls at home with African art. But the older, more moneyed elites still need to be awakened to what they are missing.

Like Danda, he noted that international auction houses have done their bit to rouse public interest in contemporary African art. However, he added that Bonham’s has been the best at conducting auctions focused on East African art while Sotheby’s is still obsessed with South African and West African art.

Still, both houses took the lead in putting African art auctions online and proving there’s indeed a market for the art. Last Tuesday, Circle’s art auction further proved that interest in East African art is growing by leaps and bounds. It’s also proved how quickly its organizers can adapt to the new circumstances and do so effectively.

 

 

 

 

 

HEARTSTRINGS BACK WITH A BANG

EARTSTRINGS COMES BACK WITH A BANG

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 9 November 2021)

Heartstrings Kenya is back at last. Their return was long-awaited as could be seen from the full-houses that showed up to see ‘Don’t Knock’, another one of the company’s crazy comedies.

As usual, Heartstrings took up current events and transformed them into juicy jokes that come straight off the ground where ordinary Kenyans have been barely surviving since the coronavirus arrived early last year.

As you’d expect, COVID-19 had to figure into the show’s script somewhere. In fact, it appears at the end of Act One when its arrival leads to the abrupt cancelation of an Events Entertainment group’s major effort to organize a Sh250 million Walk for sick kids traveling to India.

Paul Ogola as Chrispinus heads the organizing team which is already being interrupted by beautiful women. First comes the ‘professional mourner’ (Machrine Andala), then the slinky company manager Jazzy (Adelyne Nimo), and finally, Ogola’s delicious wife, Katalina (Bernice Nthenye). Ogola’s absenting himself from the office with Jazzy isn’t conspicuous. Its consequences only appear in Act 2 when you recognize her as the single mother coming to claim child support for Ogola’s son. Only now, she is no longer slinky and sexy. She’s angry and adamant that Ogola do his bit to assist in his son’s upbringing.

If the show doesn’t sound funny at this point, be assured, the cast is never short of insider jokes and sheng asides that keep the audience laughing and prepared for appreciate the lampooning of everyone from the president and MPs to gospel singers and boss Chrispinus who’s both a bully and a crook.

For instance, after Katalina has contributed sh10,000 towards one employee’s wedding plans, Ogola only hands over Sh2,000 to the man. And when he gets caught on the day Katalina shows up at work, he makes up such lame excuses you know he can even ignore the upbringing of his own child.

But Ogola gets his due in Act 2. That is when we get to the really pithy part of the play. It’s also when the troupe brings COVID and the lockdown home to their story. For now, we get an insider perspective of what has actually gone on in families who’d been stranded at home together during the pandemic.

We see that previously, Chris and Katalina hardly knew one another before lockdown. Or at least they didn’t know all the serious secrets they each had kept from the other.

As the show opens, Bernice is starting off her typical morning with yoga exercise. But in her workout clothes and without her long-haired wig and makeup, Ogola doesn’t recognize his own wife!

But that’s just the beginning. Lockdown has also led to joblessness, threats of evictions, and the basic struggle to put food on the table since cash is now in short supply. All of these issues come flooding up in Act 2 as both Chris and Katalina have lost their jobs. But as it turns out, they have lost lots more than that.

Innocent-looking Katalina had taken the family’s title deed, sold it to buy ‘better properties’ from conmen, and never told Chris until now about what she did.

But as bad as that is, when single mother Jazzy shows up to insist on child support, the fireworks start to fly. Chris is trapped like a rat. His stand against his wife’s ‘bad land’ secret seems to pale next to the arrival of ‘the other woman’ and news of his secret love child. He tries to cover up his secret by blaming Katalina, first for telling her mother about their penury and then plotting with her aunt to get a job with an MP.

But the whole situation explodes when Ogola’s mother (Machrine Andala) shows up and discovers she has a grandchild that her son has denied.

Katalina seems dumbfounded by the whole affair, especially after Jazzy discovers she had never cooked for Chris. She’s only ordered out from a pricey food delivery service.

Ultimately, it’s Chris’s mum who turns the tide around. She’s irate about the basic facts on the ground, especially that there’s a child, her grandson, who she insists will no longer be neglected. He must have a father, and Chris, Katalina, and even Jazzy must face this fact, she says.

They’ll have to work out the details, but her moralistic explosion brings resolution to a messy situation that only Heartstrings could devise, picking up pieces from people’s everyday lives.

Great show but heavy editing is required to tighten up the flow.

KITFEST:THEATRE FESTIVAL WITH A GLOBAL REACH

                          THEATRE FESTIVAL WITH A GLOBAL REACH

                                                                                                   Senegalese theatre

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted November 1, 2021)

This year’s Kenya International Theatre Festival (KITFEST) already blasted off last Tuesday afternoon when the Royal Burundi Dancers staged a performance outside, in front of the National Archives.

The official opening of KITFEST took place shortly thereafter at Kenya National Theatre, which is the venue where all the performances, cultural activities, and workshops will go on daily up until November 14^th.

Kevin Kimani, the Festival’s founder and executive director has scheduled a meaty agenda of activities this year. He has been busy since founding KITFEST back in 2016, when he proved he could feature as many (if not more) international teams as local ones every year.

Black out by Millaz Productions

lt will be featuring performances by artists from no less than ten countries. Most of them are African, including those from Burundi, Cameroon, Egypt, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. Outside Africa, there will be multiple performances and displays by the Chinese Embassy as well as by an award-winning musical by a cast from Cincinneti, USA and a play by an Indian company as well.

The program promises entertaining performances by a wide range of artists. They include everyone from straight actors, spoken word poets, and singers, to puppeteers, acrobats, and dancers. There will be workshops on all aspects of theatre being held throughout the festival. There will also be scheduled tours taking festival participants and friends around the city and beyond.

Kimani has ensured that Kenyan thespians are also well represented this year. That hasn’t been a difficult task since so many interesting performances have already been staged following the loosening of the COVID lockdown. It’s been as if the thespians have stored up their creative energies so they could burst forth on stage at KITFEST with highly original shows.

                                                                                          South African theatre

Already we have seen ‘Men of Ambitions’ by the Journals of Orino which was the opening play of the festival. That followed a modern dance troupe from Egerton University and French song by a solo singer Shirleen Ishenyi.

The Journal of East African Theatre was also finally launched at the opening. It had been promised for several years, but due to COVID and the curfew, it wasn’t published until now. Hopefully, it will evolve into an authoritative, scholarly publication that can shed global light on the artistic activities of our regional thespians.

Other productions to be staged by Kenyans during the festival include ‘Black Out’ by Millaz Productions, ‘Contract Love’ by Kenyatta University, ‘Audacity’ by Tellerscope Entertainment, and KCA’s Sheng-styled interpretation of The Lion King, ‘Simba Bazenga’. There will also be performances by thespians from Nanyuki and Meru where KITFEST 2020 was quietly staged.

And every Thursday, the Festival will jump into the ongoing Poetry After Lunch (PAL) afternoons, introducing new audiences to Nairobi’s young and talented spoken word poets.

The other performances that reveal the Festival’s far-sighted focus on youth will be two plays from Nanyuki High School which did well during this year’s Kenya Schools Drama Festival. And finally, there will be a repeat performance of ‘Men of Ambition’ on the last day of the Festival.

But the Kenyan contribution is only a fraction of the festivities scheduled for the coming days. Already, we saw a Senegalese evening on Wednesday following the francophone production ‘D’Ou tu Vas?’ (Where are you going?) by the troupe Brrr Production. The Egyptians plan to also have an evening of cultural offerings. And then on the final Saturday, the Chinese Embassy will host a slew of cultural activities, including the preparation of Chinese food.

In the interim, there will be a number of dance performances, one by the Tanzanian Waka Waka Dance Theatre, one the Egyptian Kemet Dance Theatre entitled ‘Faust’, and Kenya’s Sarakasi’s dancer-acrobats who will perform today with their talented team of dynamic percussionists.

But the upcoming plays by regional and international troupes are especially noteworthy. This evening, the Ugandan Lantern Meet Foundation is staging ‘Killing Time’. Then there will come the Zimbabwe Theatre Academy staging ‘Zandezi’, the American company coming from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music who will perform their musical interpretation of ‘Water’.

Finally, South Africa never fails to bring powerful performances to KITFEST. This time round, they have brought two exciting shows, one by Intokozo Productions entitled ‘Munyari Eclipse’ and another by Kekeletsi entitled ‘Chronicles of a Whore’.

And for those who didn’t attend KITFEST 2020 in Meru, Kimani brought back the star performance, ‘Nyota ya Meru’ by a troupe of older mothers who will illustrate how theatre can help solve local social problems.