I attended the opening, December 11, of Live Art Weekend at the Baxter – in the Masambe and its surrounds. 

Live Art Weekend continues tomorrow, Friday, December 12 and Saturday December 13 at 7pm.  The theme is Soft Rebellion – a call out to resist with a softness- careful persistence. “In a world desensitised by ongoing injustice, Soft Rebellion invites artists to explore tenderness as resistance”. The curator is Carin Bester. 

It was a beautiful, stimulating and immersive evening. Please get there. Tomorrow and Saturday and then that is it for 2025.


As always at Live Art Weekend, performances are activated inside the Masambe and outside. It was a glorious summer night, no wind. The traffic was loud. The audiences was rapt, reverent, focused.

Get there before 7pm as Cheryl Traub Adler and Garth Erasmus start their performance early, on the little mezzanine platform, perched above the stairs to the Masambe. It is titled Erase / Mark / Hold and audience is invited. Paint and chalk is involved. And then it is smudged, erased. But Cheryl urges us that “To erase is not to vanish.” We leave traces, tracks. A palimpsest of marks, scribbles, imprints remain “after”.

Then we went inside for Nomandla Vilakazi – “The Exhibition”. The “ Black Femme Body” is the medium, the container, the kindling in this fierce, passionate and tender, tribute to Sara ‘Saartjie’ Baartman. The live performance is presented, with a film (on screen behind her) of a performance she presented at UCT to “mark the renaming of UCT’s Jameson Hall in her honour.

At the Q&A, Nomandla mused tonight that Sara Baartman was the ultimate showgirl, doing umpteen performances a week, prodded, paraded; exhibited. Loved this performance and the interaction between live performances, film, movement and voice.

I was charmed by the quirky Vroulikheid – outside – by Zizi Onkabetse  Masizana – with a gorgeous Voortrekker kappie and Boere and Afrikaner folk music.  “Vroulikheid reimagines the ritualised welcoming dances of the Kalakuta Queens, transposing them into a South African live performance piece, anchored by Afrikaner domestic imagery. Beneath kappies, aprons, lace, and veldskoene, the performance summons a body caught between colonial memory and ancestral rhythm.” 

I am running out of time – I want to get this out – to urge people to go this fabulous Soft Rebellion – so I am citing the other pieces from the media release.

The other pieces:

“Amogelang Pila Ditlhale & Thato Ditlhale – Reimagination of Blackness- Perceptions: Re-narrating the Black Experience (Video Art).An interrogation into the ways Blackness is seen and understood, emphasising the importance of shifting the narratives away from colonial distortions and inherited traumas, towards a re-affirmation of confidence, ancestry, and our lived excellence. “

And: “Smamkele Mentyisi & Sange Mpambani – Nkanyezi kaSililo: “Initiation -borrows African traditional modes of healing to facilitate a healing experience for the black queer body. The performance is a commentary on the importance of community and family in trauma healing. Nkanyezi ka Sililo challenges the rhetoric that queerness is un-African by integrating queer trauma healing within an African community-based context”.

If I had time, I would go again. I loved being there tonight. Congrats to Carin Bester of Working Title for heading up Live Art Weekend.


In a sense, the Live Art platform is grounded in Soft Rebellion. It is a vital platform which holds space for the audience and artists to sift through chaos, trauma and process, activate, engage in the safe space of theatre.

✳ Vroulikheid at Live Art Weekend Soft Rebellion at the Baxter Masambe, Dec 11, 12, 13 2025. Pic: Robyn Cohen/TheCapeRobyn