Arts Anchor

André Wiesner: Professional Writer • Editor • Media Developer

Firebreak Studios

Text Box: South Africa’s premier satirist, Pieter Dirk Uys, speaks about international and local reaction to his revue Dekaffirnated. Was it a feel-good experience for outlanders? “No, no, no,” he said. “I also ride on their issues, their fears.”

Dekaffirnating the Global Ghetto

Text Box: Ashraf Jamal’s play Severance is nominally an Aids tragedy: a man has sex with his Aids-stricken sister so that he can die with her. “But Aids isn’t the horror in the play. It’s the death instinct, the irrevocable rot of every faculty.”

In the Country of Last Things

“For all its ferocity, modern swearing makes an about-turn from straight talk to soft talk. Yobspeak is weirdly euphemistic in the way, for instance, it can sum up an infinity of distress in the self-insulating dismissal, ‘Shit happens’.”

The Zen Cool of Yobspeak

Text Box: “‘So, Brad, what have you been up to in the past 10/15/20 years?’ It’s the essential question at high school reunions, and it opens a Pandora’s box of insecurities and rivalries. This is class war between the haves and have-nots.”

The Class War Carnival

Text Box: “He is Everyman, and every man has a friend like him: the troublemaker, agent provocateur, twister of rubber arms and demon seed whose name stinks in the nostrils of honest society. Every man dreads (desires) his phone call.”

The Shadow Knows

Arts/Culture/Society