5 Thoughts – GIPCA Fellows Midyear Presentations

The 2011 GIPCA Creative Arts Fellowships mid-year presentations will be on 12 June at 16:00 on Hiddingh Campus in association with Michaelis Galleries.

The 2011 Fellows that will be presenting their “works-in-progress” are Justin Krawitz, Lance Herman, Ruth Levin-Vorster, Sanjin Muftic and Simon Gush.

Similar to the idea of a post-doctorate, the purpose of the Donald Gordon Creative Arts fellowships is to make funding available to talented individuals who have graduated with an MA, MFA, or MMus (or have equivalent recognised creative research) to work on a year-long project within the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA). The funding provides the crucial time, intellectual and creative support required by practicing artists, and is meant to nurture a new generation of artist/performers and arts scholars. The fellowships are also intended to encourage the growth of registrations at the PhD level in the creative arts at UCT.

“This mid-year presentation allows us to get a substantial taste of the work of these excellent and provocative Fellows but most especially since they will be presented all at once, this rich experience will foreground the range of innovation and the potential for interdisciplinary work that GIPCA seeks to make space for,” commented Jay Pather, Director of GIPCA.

Award-winning South African pianist and pedagogue Justin Krawitz is exploring piano music of the Cape. This study will culminate in a lecture-recital focusing on Arnold Van Wyk’s Tristia and Hendrik Hofmeyr’s new Piano Sonata. “For my mid-year presentation I will talk a little about my experience working with another living composer Karel Husa,” said Krawitz. Pulitzer prize-winning Czech-American composer Karel Husa celebrates his 90th birthday this year. “In his honour, I will play the first movement of his Piano Sonata No.1, which I recorded last year for Czech Radio,” he added. Krawitz recently returned to Cape Town from the US, where he was an Associate Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Previously he has served on the faculties of Luther College (Iowa), the University of Cape Town and Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp (Michigan). Recent activities include performances in Serbia, Slovenia, Canada and the US, and a recording project with Czech Radio in Prague.

Eliezer is a performance persona through which Lance Herman is producing a body of writing, music, and drawings during his term with GIPCA. While the project explores questions around interdisciplinary art practice, it also inquires into how an alter-ego can inform the artist’s own sense of self. His review will consist of a reconstruction of the artist’s studio (designed and built by 4th year Michaelis School of Fine Art student Rodan Kane Hart), as well as a display of several works completed thus far. These include two music albums (Hall of Dreams and Knots), a book of aphoristic writings and drawings (My Bedroom Wall), and a manuscript of his forthcoming novel, Middelburg. Herman’s Eliezer will open on Thursday 9 June at 18:00 at Michaelis Galleries. Herman holds a Master’s Degree in English Literature and has an extensive background as a performing musician. Herman sings in a band called Ginsburg & Herman.

For her fellowship, Ruth Levin-Vorster will combine the fields of medicine, dance and film. She has conceived and will direct and choreograph a series of screen dance films entitled Do No Harm. For her mid-year presentation she will share some of the content of her films and expand on her research process to date. This will include screenings of international screen dance works that have served to draw her to this medium. Levin-Vorster is an inter-disciplinary artist working as a theatre director, choreographer, writer, teacher and performance artist. Her career began in London where she worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal National Theatre and Gate Theatre. She returned to her home in Cape Town in 2002, where she has been traversing creative forms ever since. The body serves as her portal into the unraveling of personal or relationship dynamics and spatial dynamics.

Sampling is borrowed from a music term which identifies the process of using part of previously recorded material as an instrument in a new recording. For his fellowship, Sanjin Muftic investigates whether it is possible to repeat the process for live performance, taking sections of previously performed material and re-staging these as components of a new performance. His mid-year presentation will take form in the shape of a museum exhibit that chronicles his understanding of sampling. The event will be divided into several performance exhibits, each one dealing with a different aspect of the sampling process. Participants in the exhibit will include some professional Cape Town performers, as well as UCT performance students. After having a completed an undergraduate degree in Canada, splitting focus between theatre and computer science, Muftic came to the University of Cape Town. He mastered a postgraduate degree and developed as a director of heightened texts, wrestling with Barker and Shakespeare for the UCT stage. However, the computer background would never leave him alone, and he began using multimedia in his productions.

Simon Gush‘s current body of work, in collaboration with James Cairns, is the production of video under the concept of Speculative Montage. Faith is a triptych of three short films (Positions of Vacancy, Plainsong and Distance) that look at the current status of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). The works examine the increasingly divided opinion within Cosatu in regard to ideology. Gush and Cairns will present a public reading of the scripts. After graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand with a Fine Art Degree in 2003, Gush moved to Belgium in 2007. He continued to be an active member of the South African artistic community, frequently collaborating with other producers and also curating young artists’ projects alongside developing his own practice. He completed a 2 year residency at the HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts) in Ghent, Belgium, in 2008.

The presentations are free and open to the public. They will take place at Hiddingh Hall, University of Cape Town (UCT) Hiddingh Campus, Orange Street, Cape Town on 12 June at 16:00.