KKNK: Celebration and controversy

Unfairly, it’s often the bleakest moments that get remembered. Like the time, in the 1990s, during the formative years of Oudtshoorn’s Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (KKNK), when Miriam Makeba had beer cans thrown at her. The boors responsible were racists, sure, but they left a stain on a cultural event established for a different kind of Boer.

So, too, the 2014 furore around Steve Hofmeyr, who wore his Afrikaner nationalism on his sleeve by singing Die Stem at the end of a concert in front of 45,000 people in Mbombela, during Inniebos, another Afrikaans cultural festival designed as an economic and cultural blood transfusion.

Oudtshoorn, despite criticisms of elitism and Afrikaner-centrism, has stuck to its guns and — apart from excluding those like Hofmeyr in 2015 — has moulded into a robust, forward-looking celebration of the arts. It’s diverse and promotes inclusiveness.

And say what you want about the perceived conservatism of Afrikanderdom, KKNK has never been afraid to court controversy. There was the year when the big talking point was Marthinus Basson’s production of Breyten Breytenbach’s famously unstageable Boklied. That was in 1998 and word on the street was that it was nothing but exposed penises, graphic sex and crude language. “Skandaal,” crowed conservatives; “Art!” cheered liberals.

KKNK CEO and artistic director Hugo Theart says his festival’s motto is that “there must be something for everyone”. Curating the programme, he and his team strive for balance — between niche and commercial, between experimental work and mainstream crowd-pleasers. They want to provoke and stir debate, make sure audiences are challenged and keep artistic integrity at the centre, but without scaring off bread-and-butter festivalgoers.

This year’s 30th KKNK again featured Basson’s Boklied, redux, revamped, recast and — as he tells the FM — with plenty in it that he couldn’t get away with in 1998. But men in their birthday suits, dildos, simulated sex and a hutch of live birds contributing to the soundtrack from behind a screen were not what made the four-hour bum-on-seat endurance marathon rewarding. It’s transcendent, Basson’s production, an artistic feat that is difficult to categorise, the scale of its surreal ambitions hard to quantify. You were captivated by an audiovisual stream of consciousness, while Breytenbach’s insights, arguments, dexterous word games and provocations pecked at your conscience.

Likewise, the conscience-pricking in Ek is nie Danie, gleaned from four published collections by poet Danie Marais. At times it was a confessional, sometimes a musical and elsewhere more akin to an elegy, grappling with the impossibility of living a morally blameless life as a white man in South Africa. On a stage that looked like a disembowelled recording studio, with a live soundtrack of music and effects, it was magnificently rendered, beautifully delivered (the pairing of actor Albert Pretorius and musician Schalk Joubert was inspired) and had its finger on the pulse of what theatre should strive to be: truthful, out-of-the-box, a little unhinged, deeply humbling.

The festival was also plump with shows that, whether by design or not, took aim at our zeitgeist’s unfolding horrors.

Atropa: Die wraak van vrede (The revenge of peace) was another unmissable Basson-directed play, this time Flemish writer Tom Lanoye’s retelling of the Trojan War through a contemporary lens. Gutsy, stirring and brutally honest, its cast of Greek and Trojan women raise their voices against the violence and destruction of wars waged by men. Fitting.

The arts industry is really struggling — every single day feels like some sort of battle

—  Hugo Theart

A weird, wonderful thing about this arts festival, with its packed schedule, is that you could spend two harrowing hours witnessing a lambasting of the human addiction to war and minutes later find yourself howling with laughter as theatre demigod Andrew Buckland transformed into a charming, sentient robotic vacuum cleaner and into the world’s most vicious teacup Yorkie — among other things. These and other bravura characters appeared in the new one-man physical comedy The Fool’s Guide, in which Buckland took aim at the lunacy of social media, influencer culture and AI in a world under threat from the techbro overlords.

Worries about technology and threats to human autonomy were also the focus of theatre-maker Nicola Hanekom’s new outdoor work, Die gebed van ’n halfmens (The prayer of a half-human), set in an apocalyptic tech- and AI-influenced future.

Also setting its sights on the deleterious impact of modern life was CRYBABY, a new play by actor Carla Smith, about a three-year-old whose encounter with the news instantaneously transforms him into a world-weary adult, his innocence and childhood destroyed by the weight of obnoxious headlines. Growing up, the play seemed to say, is never easy, but perhaps — in this age of tantrum-throwing world leaders and our prolonged infantilisation at the hands of online brain-rot content — childhood is precisely what we’re yearning for.

Kanya Viljoen’s Afrikaans adaptation of the 2015 Sam Steiner play, Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons, follows, non-chronologically, the relationship of a young couple living through the rise to power of a populist government that introduces a speech-limiting law. Not in the sense of censoring what people say, but curbing their ability to say very much at all. Under this democratically elected regime, speech is capped at 140 words a day, after which some sort of electric shock takes the words out of your throat.

It was a Black Mirror-type thought experiment at the intersection of cute romantic comedy and bleak Orwellian dystopia, and it felt especially prescient at a time when authoritarianism isn’t merely creeping into the mainstream but actively stripping away basic freedoms, even in traditional democracies. At a time when AI agents can scuttle through our entire online history and track data, personal interactions and potentially our thoughts, the play felt like a warning about how we are already handing our autonomy over to unpredictable forces.

Unpredictable, too, though in more positive ways, is the direction KKNK has taken. Though born out of a desire to boost Oudtshoorn’s economy and lend sustenance to the Afrikaans language at a time when many feared its demise, the festival has in many ways widened its frame of reference. It is still overwhelmingly Afrikaans, but other languages, English and beyond, are being embraced, and voices given a platform are more diverse, with a serious focus on community engagement.

Theart recognises that the KKNK is part of a wider, broader cultural ecosystem, and part of a circuit of festivals collectively working to provide platforms for artists. He knows what he’s up against in the fight to build and sustain audiences. “The arts industry is really struggling — every single day feels like some sort of battle.”

It’s a battle he and his team are winning, albeit by sometimes making tough decisions about what to exclude from the programme. There’s a logic at work. The festival isn’t an artistic free-for-all. “Producing theatre is expensive,” says Theart, who is at pains to emphasise that without heavy-hitting sponsors (like Absa, which has supported KKNK for almost 25 years), there would be no festival. “We stretch every bit of available funding as far as we can, but budget necessarily influences curation.” He says every care is taken to prevent artists from making a loss.

Winning over audiences with sustenance for the soul is all well and good, but there are also brass-tacks realities facing the theatre industry. Being an artist is not for sissies and festivals like KKNK afford crucial opportunities to work. Some 112 ticketed productions were seen at this year’s festival — that’s a lot of bums on seats, despite the impact of the Iran war fuel hikes on people’s willingness and ability to drive long distances. Still, for the estimated 1,000 actors and technicians who worked the festival, those bums meant potentially paying rent, making ends meet and, hopefully, being inspired to carry on creating.

Buckland says in the absence of any kind of cohesive national funding (“a joke with [Gayton] McKenzie in charge”), festivals like KKNK are, “more than any kind of government support structure”, the “mainstay” of our culture industry.

“Having organically developed out of communities — financially, artistically and creatively — they are the springboards for so many artists,” he says. “They are the absolute lifeblood of the culture of the country. They are heroic acts.”