Asking the same old question: how did we get here?

When trying to capture the vicissitudes of life for a SA theatre maker in the Covid-19 era, one grasps at comparisons. It’ sa rollercoaster. It’s an Olympic sport. It’s an oasis-dotted desert.

Whichever metaphor you choose, it will prove inadequate. There is no precedent for what those who work in the performing arts sector — actors, directors, musicians, playwrights, dancers, producers, crew, marketers and those playing dozens of other roles that help to make stage magic happen — have gone through over the past year and more.

Every week brings a new pivot, a new tech-enabled audience, a new in-person possibility, a new regulation, a new loss, a new door open, a new door closed. Every day brings a glimmer of hope or fresh cause for despair.

When it was announced that the Ticketpro Dome in Johannesburg would no longer be a space for large-scale shows (it is now going to house a huge second-hand car dealership — now there’s an appropriate metaphor) this seemed to confirm the industry’s worst fears about what awaits on the other side of Covid-19.

Many smaller venues have already capitulated; others are still in the fight. Daphne Kuhn’s Theatre on the Square in Sandton, for instance, is running a ThundaFund campaign to “keep the lights on”. While few independent theatres without a reliable support base to draw on are likely to survive, there is at least the guarantee that a handful of state-sponsored theatres will make it through. Nevertheless, as Mike van Graan recently argued in an article for online platform HERRI, the government’s model for public funding of theatre — such as it is — skews towards the six nationally subsidised theatres.

Van Graan’s colleagues at the Sustaining Theatre and Dance Foundation have developed an alternative model that would instead support 15 theatre companies and 15 dance companies, with at least one nationally subsidised venue per province.

It remains to be seen if the department of sport, arts & culture and its statutory bodies will listen to recommendations made by those who have expertise and experience in the sector, or if they will continue to blunder ahead with the combination of incompetence and misspending that marked, say, the allocation of PESP (Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme) funding.

Two groups that have been strident critics of the government’s inability — or unwillingness — to help our country’s artists in their hour of greatest need, the Theatre and

Dance Alliance and #IM4THEARTS, recently launched a Charter of Rights for SA Artists. It is a bold and necessary document, asserting 13 basic rights and freedoms.

Until such time as these rights are properly protected, performing artists will have to keep trucking, ducking and diving, dropping and rolling, pivoting and pirouetting.

Happily, SA theatre makers have a dependable institutional ally in the National Arts Festival, which continues in its 2021 virtual manifestation. My pick from the programme this week is Tony Bonani Miyambo’s Commission Continua, a devastating one-hander that emphasises how the culpability for historical and recent crimes

UNTIL SUCH TIME AS THESE RIGHTS ARE PROPERLY PROTECTED, PERFORMING ARTISTS WILL HAVE TO KEEP TRUCKING, DUCKING AND DIVING

perpetrated against the SA people has become buried under mountains of paperwork.

Miyambo plays shuffling archivist Bright Maluleke, whose job is to photocopy and file the findings of the various commissions of inquiry that investigate the dodgy dealings to which we have become inured to with the ANC in power.

He wryly observes that South Africans are “obsessed with scratching our heads” and asking, “How did we get here?”

It becomes clear that Maluleke has internalised the grim contents of the many reports given into his care. Over the course of the play, his anger at the sheer iniquity of it all — the lack of accountability, the effective silencing of witnesses and victims — builds to a crescendo, powerfully orchestrated through Miyambo’s deft use of a loop station.

We experience despair and sorrow at the evocation of the Marikana massacre, the Life Esidimeni scandal and so many other outrages that have been filtered through the system of a commission of inquiry.

And yet, as a taped soundtrack reminds us, the question “How did we get here?” takes us back half a millennium: before apartheid, before the arrival of the British, before even the Dutch, to Portuguese navigators in the 15th century.

No wonder we scratch our heads.