What: Working Title, Live Art Weekend at Masambe Presents – Art as Resilience
When: August 29 – 31, 2024 – Thursday, Friday, Saturday
Venue: Masambe Theatre, Baxter Theatre Centre
Time: 7pm. The programme is about 90 minutes.
Bookings: Webtickets
Direct booking link: https://baxter.uct.ac.za/events/working-title-masambe-presents-art-resilience https://www.webtickets.co.za/v2/Event.aspx?itemid=1551607738
Tickets: R150 full price, R100 students /seniors/group booking
Curator: Carin Bester
Featured artists: Oupa Sibeko & Sinenhlanhla Millicent Sihlangu, Kaulana Williams, Eddie Newman & Siphenathi Mayekiso, Iman Zanele Omar, Gavin Krastin and Carin Bester

Note: The programme on– Thursday, Aug 29 will include a Q&A with the artists. Dress warm as two of the performance are outside.

No Under 16s    

The 3rd iteration of Working Title’s Live Art Weekend platform will be on from August 29 – 31, 2024 – Thursday, Friday, Saturday – at the Baxter – in its Masambe Theatre and outdoors in the Masambe precinct. Carin Bester, the curator gives insights into the programme:

TCR: Art as Resilience is such as brilliant theme. Can you comment on the theme and your curatorial prompt to those on the programme or was it a matter of them submitting their work and you putting together on this platform?

CB: Art as Resilience is about the resilience we have not just as artists but how artist use their art to create awareness around the resilience of all humans in many different realities of difficult and unjust situations. The works are about personal and communal experiences.  Often artist create work about a personal experience, but once the work is presented that personal experience resonates with many others who have, in their own lives, experienced something similar. It’s a way to break the bubble of isolation and share in our burdens and resilience of moving forward.

As with Art Must Be, most performers applied, from where I carefully make the selection for the program to have diversity and ensure an interesting program. 

TCR: Insights into the works that will be presented?

CB: Art as Resilience is a full programme. It starts with a video piece presented in the Masambe foyer which makes out part of the first performance which will take place outside, once all the audience members have arrived, they will be led to where the performance takes place. From there they will go back inside to watch the 2nd Live performance in the stage area. The 3rd performance will take place outside again and the 4th performance will again be inside followed by a video performance.   Because the performances will take place in different spaces, the audience will have that moment in between which helps to digest what one has just seen before the next piece.

TCR: Can you talk about activating the Masambe Precinct – and using outdoor spaces there for Art as Resilience?

As with the very first Live Art weekend we will be using inside as well as outside spaces. With Art Must Be, the audience was asked to give us a few minutes between performances all of which took place inside on the stage. Having both inside and outside available ads a different layer to the work, audience gets to view the work from different angles, in different settings and instead of waiting for the next piece to be ready on the stage the audience is led to where the next performance takes place. This possibility was one of the main reasons I decided to present Live Art Weekends at Masambe.