The joy of not understanding everything

On Friday night this week, I went back to university.

Not to study. Thankfully 🙂

I was the guest, with Rikus, of our mate Dr Schalk van der Merwe at the Stellenbosch University Drama Department’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s Baal.

I have known about Schalk for years and continue to be amazed by his talent, curiosity and sheer creative energy. He is a lecturer at Stellenbosch, postgraduate programme coordinator from Honours through PhD and works across theatre studies, performance, voice and speech and children’s theatre. His research interests themselves tell you something about the breadth of the man: artistic research, witchcraft and sexual representation in performance. He has acted, written, directed and created theatre for years.

And now he has taken on Baal.

Which is not choosing the easy road.

Scene one: a young Brecht behaves badly

Bertolt Brecht wrote the first version of Baal in 1918 when he was just 20.

Twenty!

It was his first full-length play and was only first performed five years later, on 8 December 1923 at the Altes Theater in Leipzig. Even then audiences struggled with it. Apparently a fair portion of the first-night crowd had absolutely no idea what Brecht was doing. Which, having watched it more than a century later, made me feel considerably better.

Baal is a poet. Brilliant, magnetic, selfish, sensual, destructive and increasingly monstrous.

He drinks. He fucks. He seduces. He uses people. He rejects bourgeois respectability while happily consuming what, and who, he wants. Eventually destruction catches up with him.

This is early Brecht, before the fully developed “epic theatre” for which he later became famous, but already you can see the artist who wants to disturb rather than reassure. Baal is poetic prose, songs, fragments and scenes rather than a comfortable little plot that takes you gently from A to B.

And that matters.

Because theatre does not always need to make us comfortable.

Actually, some of the best theatre shouldn’t.

Scene two: Stellenbosch goes bohemian

Schalk and his team have created a wonderfully strange world.

I loved the set.

I loved the music.

I loved the movement.

And I loved the slightly hipster, Burning Man, bohemian take on the material. There were moments when I found myself thinking of Moulin Rouge (one of my favourite films) that same sense of beauty and decay living alongside one another. Desire, music, bodies, excess, romance and danger all jostling for space.

The current production deliberately combines movement, music and strong visual imagery to explore that tension between creation and destruction. (ticketbee.co.za)

It worked for me.

But here is the important qualification:

Baal is not easy.

It is confusing.

It will definitely not be everyone’s cup of tea.

And I am equally certain that not everyone who sees it will love it.

I did.

Partly because it is interesting.

And partly because it is confusing.

We have become terribly accustomed to demanding instant clarity. Explain the plot. Explain the point. Give me the takeaway. Preferably in three bullets, accompanied by a 30-second Reel.

Art sometimes asks something more difficult of us.

Sit.

Watch.

Listen.

Wonder.

Allow yourself not to know.

Scene three: the Stellenbosch AGM

Rikus and I were joined by our mates Celeste and Anne.

The four of us have become known – largely to ourselves, admittedly – as the Stellenbosch AGM.

Being with these three humans is very good for my soul.

There are people in your life who compete with you. People who tolerate you. People who need something from you.

And then there are the people who genuinely want the very best for you … who celebrate when things go well and who somehow bring out a better version of you simply by being around.

Rikus, Celeste and Anne are those people for me.

Even when, in Celeste’s case, the theatre smoke machine appears determined to kill her.

Which brings me back to Baal.

Sometimes you fight the smoke.

Sometimes you allow it to envelop you.

There may be a philosophy of life somewhere in there.

Scene four: lines, not dots

The AGM also had drinks and caught up with our mates Armand and Sean at the show.

Two remarkable humans. Hugely talented, beautiful inside and out and excitingly Comrades runners next year. Already Hyrox converts and now runners too. I approve of this trajectory enormously.

They will also be part of our Woordfees journey at KleinBlouKlip this year – another event that has already sold out.

And perhaps that is one of the things I increasingly notice about life: it isn’t a collection of separate dots. It is full of lines.

Schalk is now writing a play for our mates Dirk and JC and their forthcoming festival in Aberdeen.

Dirk van der Westhuizen and his mum Hanna will, in turn, be at KleinBlouKlip during Woordfees for Knuppeldik aan kinkelkos. They won Kokkedoor: Son & See together and their Woordfees evening combines food, family stories, music and memories around a long table. Dirk’s partner JC van der Merwe is also part of their Aberdeen world and their creative adventures.

One friend leads to another.

A play leads to a festival.

A festival leads to a dinner.

A dinner leads to another story.

Years later the lines cross again somewhere completely unexpected.

Life is full of these connections.

We just need to remain open enough to see them.

Scene five: students

There was another line for me on Friday night.

When I was a student at Stellenbosch I regularly went to productions at the Drama Department.

Decades later I can still walk into a university theatre, take my seat and watch another generation of students put themselves out there.

What a privilege.

And congratulations to them.

Because performing Baal requires courage.

Frankly, performing anything requires courage.

You walk onto a stage knowing that people are going to judge you. Some will love what you do. Some will misunderstand it. Some will dislike it. Occasionally they will dislike it loudly.

And you do it anyway.

That matters.

It is one of the reasons I am so proud to be a patron of FEDA, the Festival of Excellence in Dramatic Arts, alongside Ismail Mahomed. FEDA exists specifically to give young theatre makers a safe but serious platform to write, direct, perform, experiment and sometimes fail. It has grown from a small school theatre festival started in 2004 into a platform involving dozens of schools and thousands of young creatives in Johannesburg, Durban and Capet Town.

We need more of that.

Not less.

And enormous credit must also go to the lecturers, directors, technicians and teachers who create the environments in which young people can take those risks.

Enabling creativity is itself creative work.

Epilogue: put the phone away

Woordfees is almost upon us again.

KleinBlouKlip will be filled with writers, cooks, artists, musicians, friends, wine, conversation and ideas. As will the whole of Stellenbosch.

I cannot wait.

But before then, Baal reminded me of something simple.

Support art.

Buy the ticket.

Go to the student production.

Watch the weird play.

Listen to music you don’t know.

Read the difficult book.

Sit in a theatre for two hours without your phone.

Focus on one thing.

Allow your mind to wander rather than your thumb.

And perhaps most importantly, resist the urge to understand everything immediately.

Some things are worth wrestling with.

Some people are worth making space for.

Some art should leave you slightly unsettled.

And if the smoke machine gets you – as it did Celeste – maybe don’t fight quite so hard.

Let the smoke envelop you.

You never know what you might see when it clears.

Thank you Schalk, the entire creative team and especially those brave Stellenbosch students.

I loved being confused.

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