Culture, Ms Noxolo Abraham-Ntantiso during the 2009 National Arts Festival
media launch
3 April 2009
Greetings
It gives me great pleasure to once more welcome the National Arts Festival
to the soil of the Eastern Cape. The province of the Eastern Cape is proud to
be associated with this festival. We have been partnering for six years now and
we see the benefits that this partnership brings to the people of the Eastern
Cape.
It was out of a quest to give a platform to the arts and culture
practitioners of this province to showcase their skills and talent that we
agreed to invest into this festival. As it is, we are investing R4,126 million
annually for the next three years to make sure that artists from the Eastern
Cape participate in this festival.
As the government of the Eastern Cape, we are focusing on those artists that
are skilled but cannot be able to finance themselves to participate in
festivals of this magnitude. We are strongly biased towards the groups from
rural areas whilst we do not leave out groups from the urban areas as well. We
have seen some spin-offs that our people are getting from participating in this
festival. For the festival, we are supporting various art forms, including
music, visual arts and crafts, dance, drama and language.
We are once more bringing our Cape Cultural Ensemble, a production that has
now grown to a level of international performance. We, of course, keep changing
the theme over different years because it is through this group that we are
hoping to spread knowledge about the cultures of the people of the Eastern
Cape. The focus this year is on the dance forms of the âAmaGcalekaâ people. As
always, there will be multicultural dance forms displayed around this focus
point.
We are also bringing in new artists who have proven themselves at the
various provincial festivals that we have held, viz: Dance and Drama Festival
and the Wild Coast Festival. The popular âImfeneâ dance will now be dancing to
live music by âNtombethongo,â a leading Maskhanda musician from the Port St
Johnâs area. They will be performing in the fringe programme and will be
drawing crowds to the Dakawa Art Centre. This will mark the revival of the
centre. We have also combined three leading dance groups that have excelled at
the Dance and Drama Festival held annually at the Opera House in Port
Elizabeth. That group will be performing in the âStudio Projectâ held at the
recreation hall.
This project is a stepping stone for our budding theatre performers. The
Wordfest is continuing to unearth writing skills for our poets and
authors.
Through this project, we are managing to create networking chances for our word
practitioners and publishers. This has created a number of chances for our
authors to have their poems and books published. We are proudly celebrating our
volume three of âIsivivaneâ, an anthology of poems by our local writers. We are
planning to be launching a book by one of writers that has collected a lot of
experience on societal issues, particularly on African rituals. The book is
focusing on âUkuthwasaâ, the initiation into being a traditional healer.
We also pride ourselves for the development of craft that we bring to the
fore.
We will not only sell craft but will demonstrate to the members of the public
how craftwork is developed. We have also managed successfully to promote
collaborations in the music industry. We are, this year, bringing jazz
ensembles from the various districts. We shall also be showcasing our own
ensemble of indigenous instruments. This will showcase how indigenous
instruments can be used to create harmony in music and also as a form of
encouraging harmony amongst various populations of the Eastern Cape.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Eastern Cape is once more proud to host the
National Arts Festival. As the people will be coming from the Confederations
Cup, we will gladly welcome them at the festival, with the hope that we shall
be celebrating the victory of Bafana Bafana.
Thank you.
Issued by: Department of Sport, Recreation Arts and Culture, Eastern Cape
Provincial Government
3 April 2009
Source: Eastern Cape Provincial Government (http://www.ecprov.gov.za)
