Thursday, September 10, 2009

Make-over for 969

You are in the right place! You are still at the Paydirt blog, just that I have just replaced the first draft poster with our new-look poster.

The whole play has a new gloss - slicker transitions and lots more polish. You'll remember that our initial impulse was to look at the city through three different lenses - portrait, still life and landscape. So obviously, the portraits are the easy part. We've collected some beautiful stories, all based on the 'come to Egoli to seek your fortune' theme. I'm loving the way all these stories fuse, and mirror the heroine's central story.

The landscape part is a little trickier - there's so much we wanted to do - from the glitzy shopping malls to the yellow cake mine dumps. But we couldn't take too much time away from the momentum of the story, so we just focused in on downtown - an incantatory meditation on streetnames and getting to know the maze.

The still life aspect was largely missing from our Grahamstown run, but now we're working in some beautiful moments. Some objects are so typical of the Joburg experience - keys and locks and alarms and gate remotes come to mind. Hawkers on street corners selling car chargers and sunglasses. But it depends where you move on the grid of the city. For some its the oily vetkoek for sale at taxi-ranks. The handwritten signs held by beggars on street corners - some plaintive: "no job no money no food pliz help", and sometimes more creative ones: "My dog is arrested for eating Robert Mugabe's shoes. need money for bail". Tiny hairdressing salons with bad wigs on polystyrene heads.

What's your archetypal Joburg still life?


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Paydirt by Tamara Guhrs and Paydirt cast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 South Africa License.