The Weekend Edition - Vacancies, Auditions, Networking Meetings and an Opinion Piece

Some weekend reading for you.

Vacant post at the Market Photo Workshop

Coordinator: Photojournalism and Documentary Photography (PDP)

To facilitate teaching and learning in the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Programme (PDP) through logistics and resource management, and to contribute to the development of a curriculum that is relevant to the media sector and contemporary documentary practice.


Job requirements:

- A relevant qualification (photography, visual arts, media, journalism)
- Minimum 1 years experience in a junior management position within the media, arts and culture industries, non-profit OR minimum 3 years relevant experience in the media, arts and culture, non-profit
- A good understanding of the needs of photojournalists and documentary photographers in South Africa and the continent as a whole, and also a critical awareness of the nature and role of the media on the continent.
- Good communication, writing and organisational skills.
- Excellent computer skills – especially MAC based, good knowledge and understanding of Photoshop, internet research, email
- Work well under pressure
- Experience of working at an education and training NGO or similar organisation would be an advantage
- Compliment the skills set of the Market Photo Workshop
- Committed to excellence in and relevance of photography education in South Africa
- Passionate, driven and dynamic

Level of education: Relevant tertiary qualification – either in photography, cultural management and/or Media.


Remuneration:

R7,500 - R9,000 per month cost to company negotiated according to qualifications and experience.

Only applications submitted electronically will be considered and must include:

1. A covering letter: summarise career, explain interest in the position.
2. A comprehensive CV with contactable references.

To:
Manager: Programmes and Projects
bandileg@marketphotoworkshop.co.za
Manager: PDP
irisp@marketphotoworkshop.co.za
Deadline for application: Monday 22 April 2013 at 10h00.

Shortlisted candidates must be available for an interview 25 – 26 April 2013.

The successful candidate will need to start in May 2013 or soon thereafter.


Please note:
Only short-listed candidates will be notified.
Qualified people from historically disadvantaged groups are especially encouraged to apply.
The Market Photo Workshop reserve the right not to employ a suitable candidate is not found.

For more information about this position visit www.marketphotoworkshop.co.za or contact us on 011 834 1444.

The Market Photo Workshop is a division of The Market Theatre Foundation.

KZN Casting: Central Park West – One act comedy By Woody Allen

Casting a production of Woody Allen’s one-act comedy, ‘Central Park West’. Seeking actors in Durban/KZN area. Please submit CV & headshot to Catarina (Director) at centralparkwestplay@gmail.com ASAP. Auditions will be held early-mid April and production will be in early July in Durban.

Character breakdown:

Phyllis:
Female 20’s - 40. Successful Psychoanalyst. Married to Sam (unhappily).

ALREADY CAST

Carol:
Female 20’s – 40’s. Wife of Howard and best friend of Phyllis. Having an affair with Sam.

Howard:
Male 20’s - 40’s. Carol’s husband. Suffers from intense Manic-depressive mood swings.

Sam:
Male 20’s - 40’s. Lawyer & Phyllis’ Husband. Philanderer & having an affair with Carol & Julia

Julia:
Female. 18-year-old patient of Phyllis. Having an affair with Sam.

(Source - Pansa) 

BWA DAY Launch - Business Banter
Date: Friday 12th April 2013   Venue: Coastlands, Umhlanga

Breakfast and Networking, Motivational
Talks, Financial Focus and more all for

Business Women.

Contact Details. 

Branch Coordinator: Catherine Smith
Phone: 031 563 8496
Cell: 084 468 8251
Fax: 086 612 5797
Email: dbn@bwasa.co.za

A Residencia in South Africa? : In Search of The Poets

by Timothy Sparks

In the Nineteen-Twenties, South Africa was a dynamic polis of interesting writers and new energy.  Uys Krige, the Afrikaans Poet played French club rugby and translated Spanish Poetry.  Roy Campbell dazzled England with his debut volume, ‘The Flaming Terrapin’ in 1924. In England between the catastrophe of the First War, a surge of antagonism and creativity rose through these young poets and artists that burnt out just before the Second World War. In South Africa we faced this world in our own way. Eugene Marais was still alive, as was Gustav Preller and Poet Dirk Opperman’s genius was in its infancy.

In these barren artistic times, today we should cast our minds to another world, on to the Iberian Peninsula almost a century ago. The Spanish Residencia named  La Residencia de Estuadiantes in Madrid was an example of cultivated life and creativity arose as this university (almost a spontaneous meeting-place) became a great centre of eccentricity, passionate friendship and nurtured the Flame of Spanish Poetry. At its heart was the Generacićn del 1927. Poets, musicians, historians, bullfighters and artists flocked like swallows in the rain of civilisation’s chaos. The amount of genius that flowed through Spain in the twenties and thirties, gathering midst the maelstrom of these years, still dazzles an inquiring mind. Roy Campbell, the great South African Poet translated the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, one of the poets who would call the Residencia home. Some would be astounded to find that this immaculate city, famous for Spanish poetry’s most marvellous flowering, burnt high on the oxygen of the Oxbridge Tradition. These vagabond poets flourished with the blessing of one Luis de Gongora, at the Ateneo in a night in Seville in 1927, celebrating three hundred years since the death  of the neglected  16th Century Poet.  Lorca delivered  a lecture “La imagin poética en dos Luis de Gongṍra” that gave the well-spring for these festivities, especially becoming its ascendant Poet.

Spanish Poetry was only matched by Russian poetry of a generation earlier where the charms of Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Mandelstam, to name a few dwelt in the court of the old Tsar. Descriptions of deep song flourished in this era where past and present danced with sense. All the fountains of the Alhambra could not conspire to halve the tide of Jorge Guillen, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén y Álvarez , Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Manuel de Falla or the fervour of Miquel Hernández. Please notice the profusion of art and poetry flowing together.

South Africa’s Roy Campbell ignored by South African universities, for a strange reason not related to his poetry had this to say about Federico Garcia Lorca:

Not only did he lose his life

By shots assassinated:

But with a hammer and a knife

Was after that -- translated.

A Spanish acquaintance of mine, during my studies at the University of Natal, Senor Sanguillo Romero told me that he was researching Roy Campbell’s role as Poet during the Twenties and Thirties. He spoke of ‘the tremendous interest in that country for Campbell’s work and life’. Senor Romero, a lecturer in Europe Studies lived in the same road as the famous composer Rodrigo. Joaquin Rodrigo who grew into life in the Spain after the retreat from Empire, from 22 November 1901- 6 July 1998, lived beyond the Hundred Years’ Commemoration of Garcia Lorca’s death in Nineteen-Ninety-Eight.

Local ignorance is a betrayal of Roy Campbell and was evidence of more intrigue.  Clearly the Durban High School man was more féted elsewhere than in South Africa. The manner Campbell is treated here in the country of his birth is a tragedy that deserves attention. Patrick Cullinan was also part of this futility, and similarly, was banished and sent into virtual exile. The latter, awarded an Italian medal of literature, translation, and I would add general cultivation, this fine poet (Cullinan) was ignored at his death despite his title Cavilliere in Italy. A week after a poetry reading a letter was forwarded via email that attached itself to an online tribute to Patrick Cullinan. So I was told in this brutal, cursory way of the death of our greatest living Poet in 2011. The newspapers were silent.

In the armada of literary capacity that thrives very uncertainly on these shores, bathing in tepid depths in the early morning sometimes the turtle floats upright. Alan Paton also fell under Campbell’s spell; writing of an enchanting evening in Paris:

“I witnessed a pyrotechnical display in the gloom of Sloane Square, so dazzling that the pale faces of the waitresses seemed to catch alight if not with comprehension, then with admiration and envy that human beings could still explode and crackle in such a dreary world.”

Sydney Good Sir Smith, broadcasting at the time of Campbell’s death in Portugal, hinted at the loss that poetry would feel for long after the giant departed. Smith noted the complicated elan of the scion of the famous Durban Campbell family when he spoke of the burning passions going into Romantic lyricism:

”To remind us in the old ways are still valid and recall us to a manifestation of the spirit that seems to die (but does it really?!) a little more in every generation, as our society gets gradually levelled out.  Character and identity make society, Campbell shot through the firmament making a statement.”

Roy Campbell was a Poet great in his ability to mould his life with the seamless capacity of his verse, because his artistic stature itself was above the ordinary, obviously, it infuriated those of lesser talent. Columns have probably been written in the old citadels of Leon about the well gone dry.

I read a History of the Hellenes called ‘Greeks without Columns,’ and the book is recommended for what it says about the commercial spirit, felt by the expanding city of Athens. The creation of the enormous city from small and disparate towns was the death of the arts, since with the loss of Asia Minor; Greek confidence was affected by the crush of History and one of the first victims was the spark of writing. Kindling for the fires of 1922 and Ancient Byzantium was laid desolate; the civilisation scattered like glowering stars.

Writing does decline or fall away in the headlong pursuit of science. In South African Universities in the 1990’s this distinct harrowing of the Arts continues to haunt us to such a great extent. The problems experienced by Roy Campbell in “The Hothouse of the Grocery-den” of Durban are still very prominent in the vapid disregard of the artistic instinct in society. These strong manacles are felt especially among those not ‘bought’ entirely or as in the elaborate world of Spain, nights brilliantly described in the annals of that far-off age; the world before the abyss, carved on the walls of the poetry of Hernandez. South African theatre and poetry (especially in England) faces a chasm and the writing is truly on the wall.

In this era of great commerce but small art, it is refreshing to realise what a renaissance in South African Literature would mean. Many people regard art as outmoded, banal or an anathema. With the collapse of the South African Universities, there is the potential for literature to thrive and even stagnate into a backward, inward-looking populism. We have a plethora of poetry festivals but few great poems with lasting fascination. The idea of a Residencia might look unpopular, because I’ve had more fun reading the speeches of Goebbels in Serbo-Croat than reading the present South African poetry in English!

The essence is that poets should form in superior constellations. In the Nineteen-Twenties, l’ enfant terrible of film, Bunuel and others gathered in bonhomie but with grace, skill and pedagogue methods in their sincere flights of passion. We are but guests in this world, as Aristophanes (circa 448-360 B.C.) said:

“Let each man exercise the art he knows.”   The Gentleman of the Hellenes also had this to say:   κωμῳδοδιδασκαλίαν εἶναι χαλεπώτατον ἔργον ἁπάντων)*.At least with the recidencia Art and Science stood on the same ground, even perhaps on the same street.

ἡμῶν γὰρ ἄνδρες, κοὐχὶ τὴν πόλιν λέγω,

μέμνησθε τοῦθ᾽ ὅτι οὐχὶ τὴν πόλιν λέγω,

ἀλλ᾽ ἀνδράρια μοχθηρά, παρακεκομμένα...

People among us, and I don't mean the polis,

Remember this - I don't mean the polis -

But wicked little men of a counterfeit kind....

Roy Campbell’s famous verse from the Waygoose “South Africa, renowned both far and wide. For politics and little else beside,” seems to echo the sentiment, that genius is formed largely by reason and imagination coupled together in a tempestuous, and artistic embrace.

In Cyprus today the black darts of Banks slide by rule, of strange vagaries ,but what binds man to man is the common smile at the cross-roads. True Art binds in greatness. The Residencia is an idea that draws artists together and does not descend into irrational affectations, incessant writers’ workshops, in machinations where we forget the wonder of just dreaming. In the silence, carved in the landscape, and the features, are thoughts and fears that go on forever.

*“The author-director of comedies has the hardest job of all”.

Timothy Sparks is a freelance writer

email: tpwsparks@hotmail.com 

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