A FEMALE FRANKENSTEIN STAGED BY KENYANS

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted August 2020)

Nyokabi Macharia might be best known in Nairobi for being Mary Magdelene in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ or for playing Giraffe in Eric Wainaina’s musical, ‘Tinga Tinga Tales’ or possibly playing Wangu wa Makeri in Too early for birds 5^th edition, ‘Brazen’.

One role we are not familiar with her in is that of Director. But that is easily remedied simply by going to YouTube and looking for her channel. There you will find the premiere performance of ‘The Book and its Cover’, dramatized by two of Nairobi’s most illustrious young actresses, Auudi Rowa and Akinyi Oluoch and directed over Zoom by Nyokabi.

Long distance directing was an imperative not just because of the COVID 19 lockdown and social distancing thing. It also had to be because Nyokabi is in the UK, performing with a theatre company there.

When and how she got there is not the issue. What’s more important is that she was inspired to adapt the stage version of Mary Shelley’s stunning novel ‘Frankenstein’, after seeing another adaptation of the same on YouTube, having been staged at the National Theatre of London for free during the pandemic. That production stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller. (Ironically, both men have played wildly different interpretations of Sherlock Holmes).

Needless to say, Nyokabi wanted to stage a gender-bending version of the story, which she did and which premiered last Friday, July 31st. She had Auudi play the Dr Frankenstein character and Akinyi play the Monster.   

Sadly, this trio of dynamite female actors only staged Act 1 of the tale, at the end of which we were told that the show’s remainder would be staged once they get a producer who will give them both financial and professional support.

In the meantime, Nyokabi’s zooming direction has paid off as it has proved that a top-quality show can premiere with the Kenyan actors giving a passionate and polished performance even though they didn’t have their director in the room with them.

It helped that both women are well-seasoned performing artists who have worked well together in the past. What’s more, all three are so passionate about acting that the energy and intensity required to make this show come alive is evident in abundance, as one will see when you find Nyokabi’s channel and watch on YouTube.

The opening moments of the show are silent (apart from the magnetic mood music) since Victoria is alone until the Monster miraculously appears. Then the complex relationship between the Creator and her monstrous creation rapidly unfolds as we learn the Monster has gone rogue and actually murdered Victoria’s fiancé.

The physical fight scene that ensues between the two women is brilliantly brutal, and it looks like it isn’t going to end well for either one. Remarkably well-choreographed, (especially as director Nyokabi wasn’t physically present for rehearsals), neither woman looks like a push-over. What’s more, the Director managed to draw out the emotional depth of both characters, visible first in their knock-down drag-out fight and then in a revealing dialogue that only goes so far, and then stops right when we desperately want to know what will happen next!

What we do know is that what the Monster wants is a companion. She wants Victoria to make her a man! It’s a request that this ‘mad scientist’ initially rejects. But then Victoria suddenly warms up to the idea of creating a ‘perfect man’, but not necessarily for the Monster. Rather there’s a hint that she might want to tailor-make another being for herself!

It’s a fascinating proposition but we won’t find out what comes next until the Director finds a worthy producer.

Nyokabi cleverly stopped the show right when the plot thickened and we are keen to find out answers. For instance, can this woman really make the perfect man? Does she dare play the part of a ‘god’? After all, she has already done so once.

Nyokabi has taken us just far enough into the story to whet our appetite for more. Now we can only hope that the internet will serve its purpose and ‘A Book and its Cover’ will attract the support required to bring us Act 2 of this explosively alluring story as soon as possible.

 

 

FACES FEATURE PROMINANTLY AT RED HILL SHOW

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted November 2, 2020)

Red Hill Gallery’s chief curator Hellmuth Rossler-Musch had a reason for entitling his current exhibition ‘Faces’.

Having opened last Sunday, 31^st October, and running through December, ‘Faces’ isn’t simply about portraiture or beautiful paintings that realistically replicate the facial features of people we may know (or not). That has been done and overdone, especially by a multitude of young artists who hopefully make a living drawing (and occasionally tracing from sent photos) images of couples, babies, and plenty of pretty, young faces.

But the ‘Faces’ at Red Hill are different. Only a few, like one by Fitsum Berhe Woldelibanos, have a naturalistic style. Yet, even then, the Nairobi-based Eritrean artist apparently delights in using bold, contrasting colors that further arrest one’s attention and compel you to reflect on the contours of his character, a stunning young African man whose promise and sense of optimism radiates in vibrant colors stroked skillfully on Fitsum’s canvas.

Richard Kimathi’s melancholic Madonna might also seem drawn directly from nature. Yet looking deeper, one will feel she’s a soulful composite of the artist’s emotional response to some larger circumstance. For Kimathi is a conceptual artist whose paintings invariably reflect on deeper and often more devastating concerns. In her case, this nameless child might be Kimathi’s notion of a refugee child, an orphan, or even a sex slave. She’s likely to be a representative of one such group. Her face is enigmatic enough to elicit such a response. I could be wrong, and Kimathi doesn’t talk much about his art. But the mystery is part of the magic of his artistic appeal.

The South African artist, Charles Sekano, specializes in painting faces using oil pastels on paper. The work in the Red Hill show is from a particularly fertile time in Sekano’s artistic development. He was still living, working, and evolving artistically in 1985 when Rossler-Musch estimates it was drawn. He had been living in Nairobi for several years, having fled Apartheid, first shifting to Tanzania, then finding his way to Kenya.

It was in Nairobi that Sekano taught himself everything from jazz piano and trumpet to painting and drawing. The subject matter of his art was initially inspired by his longing for his sisters. Their memory fueled his first paintings. Thereafter, lovely young women continued to feature in his art.

In the work at Red Hill, Sekano like Fitsum, uses bright colors to amplify his feelings about the four beauties. One is jet black, another chocolate brown, yet another orange ochre, and the last one, beige bordering towards white. They don’t seem to have a care in the world, which was the exact hope Sekano had for his sisters.

Finally, Rossler-Musch isn’t shy about including ugly faces in his show. For Samuel Githinji’s face is both grotesque and scary. One might also ask why the face is even in the exhibition, since it might intimidate more innocent viewers who don’t understand the world’s fascination for horror and blood-lust.  

Yet Githinji isn’t just painting like a primitive for style’s sake. He meant to create ludicrous works that might appall even the wisest eyes. For Githinji like Kimathi has something deeper to evoke in his audience. He creates paintings and three-dimensional tapestries that bespeak poverty. He shamelessly paints the beggar who might not have the strength to protest his plight, so Githinji aims to do it for him. His rage at injustice and the world’s inhumanity is conveyed, again in powerful colors, mostly flaming reds and burnt-out blacks. Githinji aims to make powerful, uncompromising statements which are most visibly seen in his faces.

Finally, the one woman in the Red Hill show is the Egyptian artist, Soaud Abdelrassoud. Having come initially to Kenya with her artist spouse, Salah Elmur whose art is also in the Faces show, Soaud had her first exhibition at Red Hill and has been exhibiting around the city ever since.

Personally, I am especially fond of the technique she employed to produce her ink-on-map face. It’s a style suggested to her, she told Business Daily in 2015, by Elmur. He at one time had been in short supply of art materials and so, used pages from second-hand books as the ‘canvas’ on which to create his art.

Elmur no longer works that way, but she discovered second-hand science books and books filled with maps offered her rare inspiration. She takes the lines, forms and contours on any page and allows them to help guide her drawing. What evolves is magical, evocative and highly original.

 

 

 

BLACK PANTHER ACTOR CHATWICK BOSEMAN DIED TOO YOUNG

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (August 2020)

News that Wakanda Forever King Chatwick Boseman, 43, died last Friday, 28 August hit Black Panther fans like a ton of bricks. Diagnosed with colon cancer in 2016, the illustrious African American actor went on to play a range of iconic Black characters despite the chemotherapy he silently endured these last four years.

Tributes immediately flooded in on social media from across Hollywood and the world.  Everyone from Barack Obama and Denzel Washington to Kamala Harris and Samuel L. Jackson expressed their shock and heartfelt sorrow at Boseman’s  demise.

A graduate of Howard University and Oxford’s British Academy of Dramatic Acting thanks to his UK tuition being covered by Denzel, Boseman paid tribute to his mentor and role model at the 2019 American Film Institute’s night honoring the Black elder statesman of film. His humility, grace and eloquence signaled the passing of a baton from the brilliant Denzel to the younger actor destined to embody a Black Renaissance in American film.

Following Oxford, Chatwick got his professional start in TV, featuring in sit-coms like ER and Law and Order. But his big break came when he starred as the first Black athlete to break into America’s top summer sport, baseball in ‘42’. Jackie Robinson’s battle with white supremacists was no different from what Black Lives Matter activists are fighting today, only that Robinson’s athleticism and heroic resilience won him the mantle of being called ‘the greatest sportsman of the 20^th century.’

Boseman’s stunning performance as Robinson was just the first of several iconic roles in which he played great Black men who have already made indelible marks on African American history.

Following ‘42’ (2013) in which he co-starred with Harrison Ford (aka ‘Indiana Jones’), Chatwick sang and moon danced as James Brown, the R&B king of funk in ‘Get on Up’ (2014). In 2017, he starred in the bio-pic ‘Marshall’, portraying Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court Justice who fought with the NAACP for Black civil rights in the 1950s. And in 2020, he starred in Spike Lee’s ‘Da 5 Bloods’ where he prophetically played a dead war vet, speaking to his Vietnam war buddies from the grave.

But it was in 2015 that he got pegged by Marvel’s Kevin Fiege to be Wakanda King and Black Panther. He would feature as T’Challa in several Avenger films, including ‘Captain America: Civil War’ and Marvel’s biggest box office hit, ‘Avengers: End Game’.

But without doubt, it is as Black Panther that Chatwick has left his deepest mark on cinema history. His performance in the sci-fi fantasy imagining a powerful and self-sufficient Black kingdom is a film classic marking a turning point in the Black Renaissance. For not only does it explore issues of race, identity and heritage. In Chatwick’s view, the film also exposed “…the conflict between Africans and African Americans [which has] existed since colonialism and slavery.”

Chatwick was born in Anderson, South Carolina and passed on in Los Angeles at home with his wife, Taylor Simone Cedward and family.

SEX IN THE CITY IV TRIUMPHS

 The latest installment of ‘Sex in the City’ IV by Michael Soi and Thom Ogonga has been both amusing and incensing audiences even before the exhibition opened early in September at Alliance Francaise.  Just the news that these two underground artistic truth-tellers were coming back up to expose what’s actually happening in the underbelly of Nairobi was disconcerting for those whose piety embraces hypocritical denial of the power and pervasive nature of sex.

But however loud and large the campaign to deprive the two a visual hearing, Alliance Francaise has always hosted their exceedingly popular showcases of Nairobi night life.

MICHAEL MUSYOKA’S COVID-CONSCIOUS ARTISTRY

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (August 2020)

Part One of Michael Musyoka’s first solo exhibition entitled ‘Time and other Constructs’ was filled with mystery, magic and a mixture of vibrant color, restless motion and curious charm in 2019. It also ensured we’d be pleased to hear he opened Part Two of ‘Time…” at One Off Gallery Saturday, 27^th August. It will run through mid-October.

COVID protocol was required to attend the opening event with the artist on hand. But friends and fans of the Brush Tu Artists Collective co-founder were prepared with masks and mindful of social distancing. And for those who couldn’t make it to the show, One Off’s owner-curator Carol Lees has most of Michael’s works up on the gallery’s website.

Part Two’s paintings have just as much magic, color mix and dramatic action as those in Part One. Musyoka still has a fondness for his stubby-legged and stout little men who seem to be avatars for the artist’s own emotions. That was one of the ‘giveaways’ shared by the artist in a ‘what’s app’ chat shortly before the show’s opening.

Acknowledging that part two is indeed a continuation of his first solo exhibition a year ago at Red Hill Gallery, one can nonetheless see qualitative differences in this second collection of almost twenty paintings. In part one, many more of his colorful avatars were on their knees, keeping us wondering, were they in prayer or bondage? Were they asking for divine guidance or for a mortal release from anyone of many man-made constructs, the most dominant one being time.

Musyoka has been a master of metaphor in much of his artistry since he emerged from Buru Buru Institute of Fine Art (BIFA) less than a decade ago. Often featuring clown-like characters (like his chubby little men), one might initially find them amusing and innocent. But then you realize they are part of a larger drama that the artist has in mind, revealed partially through his art.

But if Michael kept us guessing in Part One of ‘Time’, one at least felt we knew he was talking about man-made constraints, those limitations that society puts on us in the name of civility and social cohesion, proper socialization and the public protocol of ‘right and wrong’, good and bad.

Some of us may not think of ‘time’ as man-made. But just recall how you made a doctor’s appointment and came late. You either got sent home or to the back of the line. Your ‘punishment’ was having to wait the whole day before you could see the MD. But some ‘constructs’ are not so easily appeased. Violation of them may lead to more stringent forms of punishment, which would seem to be a theme that Musyoka aims to explore in Time, Part Two.

For while he still includes several paintings of little men dashing around as if they are rushing to ‘keep time’, he has fewer kneeling as if in prayer for forgiveness. Instead, in one powerful work he paints more muscular men dressed in a dark brownish-black blend and all running as if on a collision course toward the painting’s centre. In another, his men seem to be floating aimlessly in space, but it doesn’t look like they’ve been freed from time. They could only be momentarily adrift, unclear about what to do without their social construct.

But the most telling characters animating Musyoka’s second installment of ‘Time and other Constructs’ is more revealing of the artist’s main concern. They are the ‘Time Servants’ and are guys being most severely punished. These are the men being treated literally like dogs on a leash. One can easily see their misery, but why? Apparently, it’s because they’ve been deemed disobedient, truant or somehow in violation of the dominant man-made rules.

Unpacking Musyoka’s art, one can see that Part Two is dark. It’s also more attuned to our COVID-infused time, when violation of the new rules (like wearing masks, sanitizing and social distancing) can be punishable not merely by shame and humiliation but by disease and ultimately by death.

Several paintings in the show feature just one stubby guy who is clearly down. He’s been shot with arrows that suggest he may have already met his fateful end.

Just before the show’s opening, Musyoka noted the irony of his exhibition being about ‘constructs’ at a time when new COVID rules compel us obey the new rules or else we won’t get to see his Part Two showcase in person. So stay safe and follow the rules!

 

BLACK IS KING’ REVEALS BEYONCE AS MEGA-ARTIST

 By Margaretta wa Gacheru (August 2020)

After watching Beyonce’s new film, ‘Black is King’, one can’t help feeling her musical performance in Disney’s ‘Lion King’ was a prelude to her own creation of this sumptuous cinematic show.

Taking a cue from the acclaimed coming-of-age classic that Disney just re-presented in 2019 following the film’s original animated success in 1994, this mother of three explores alternative avenues of upbringing that a new-born black child might take on his way to becoming a king.

In the process, Beyonce reimagines a whole range of extravagant artistic possibilities that she’d make available to her own black prince and future ‘king’ (played in BiB by her son, Sir Carter).

But don’t expect ‘Black is King’ to be a children’s film. The child serves as a metaphor for the new opportunities that Beyonce takes up as a black artist who feels absolutely entitled to explore on as vast a scale as she can find, including an ocean, open sky and expansive Tunisian sandscape.

Filmed in the same spirit as Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’, Beyonce is black, proud and inclined to prove her prowess as not simply a singer, but a filmmaker as well.

The African American entertainer who is also a choreographic queen actually scripted, starred in and co-produced her latest creation with one of the biggest entertainment firms in the world, Disney.

Creating far more than a glorified music video, the sheer beauty of the film’s cinematography quickly confirms that ‘Black is King’ has a deeper, more majestic message.

It’s complicated, colorful and almost cosmic at times. It’s also lyrical, steeped in African proverbs, wisdom and poetry, including verse by the Kenya-born Somali writer, Warsan Shire, (whose poetry also featured in Beyonce’s 2016 feature-length film ‘Lemonaid’).

Best of all, the music by both African and African American artists is diverse, unflagging and invariably accompanied by exquisitely attired and choreographed dancers often led by Beyonce herself.

In fact, ‘Black is King’ might alternately be re-named Black is Queen since it is the Queen B’s (as she is known to her most adoring fans) movie from start to end. Yet her message is not merely self-glory. Not by any means. For while her film confirms that ‘Black is beautiful’ in the most emphatic way, it also embodies the singular message that ‘black lives matter.’

But rather than the film finally making a political statement, one ultimately sees that Beyonce is also talking about family. For towards the end of the film, who should show up but her mega-music mogul husband and rapper J-Z. Not that he plays a major role in the film. He has one number with his wife, but he mostly hangs out with their three kids, including their twins.

But just as ‘Lemonade’ was ultimately a music video feature that proclaimed her independence from her cheating spouse, so ‘Black is King’ is implicitly about reconciliation and the joy of being Black and beautiful, and mattering as a family that is regal, righteous and richly gifted in many different ways.

THE MEANING OF MARIAH CAREY

BY MARIAH CAREY (WITH MICHELLE ANGELA DAVIS)

REVIEWED BY MARGARETTA WA GACHERU

With 19 Number One Billboard music singles to her name, and most of them composed by the singer herself, Mariah Carey only got inducted into the American Songwriters Hall of Fame this year.

That’s just one pithy detail that is not included in Mariah’s tell-all memoir, ‘The Meaning of Mariah Carey’ that just got released a month ago, co-written with Michelle Angela Davis.

It’s hard to believe that this ‘divine Diva’, whose delicious voice easily commands five octaves, just turned 50. But her book will ensure that readers, especially her huge fandom, understand how her life has been filled with both joy and success as well as deep-seated pain and profound hardship.

Having been born into a mixed marriage that her African American father abandoned when she was just three, Mariah’s early years were impacted by both poverty and racism. Yet her first role model was her opera-singer mother who fueled her desire to be a successful singer-songwriter: a desire that she fulfilled far beyond her wildest dream.

In fact, her debut album, ‘Daydream’, released in 1990, earned her over a million dollars. And to date, she’s produced 14 more. Yet her phenomenal voice and warm, passionate heart could not ensure her path to success would be easy or effortless.

At age 23, Mariah did marry a major music mogul, Tommy Mottola, CEO of Columbia Records, who played a pivotal role in launching her career. But even as he helped her secure major music contracts, he and his company also benefitted immensely from having signed her and wedding her as well. Their marriage only lasted five years but that was long enough for her to become an international pop music icon. She would go on to become a film producer, entrepreneur and ultimately, one of the most financially successful musical diva to date.

Sadly, her film career did not meet with much success. The 2001 premiere of ‘Glitter’ was a flop. But Mariah credits several factors with contributing to the film’s poor reception. One is that the day of Glitter’s premiere was 9/11/2001, the same day in which the Twin Towers in New York were hit, over 3000 Americans died on the spot, and the country was plunged into a life-transforming ‘War on terror’. Another factor was the supposed sabotage that she believes came from her former spouse Mottola. The script also could have been better. But even so, Mariah has continued making marvelous music videos that help to sell her music.

Some of the most moving parts of her memoir relate to the racism that she encountered both from family members, (some of whom resented her being lighter-skinned than they were), some from white girls who she had thought were friends but who maliciously betrayed her trust and finally, from her own mother whose betrayal might have simply been envy of Mariah’s musical success as compared to the mom’s short-lived operatic career.

Either way, her book confirms the age-old adage that fame and fortune cannot guarantee happiness