Gaetan Schmid is a very funny man. Belgian born, but Cape Town based for a dozen years, he arrives every festival with a new fantastic original offering. Three years I discovered him in "The Dog's Bollocks" - an ingeniously funny one-hander, delivered in mock lecture format, on the hillarity of the bizarre spelling and expressions of the English language, from an outsider's pespective. Last year he brought "Rump Steak", where on a one square metre black and white tiled stage, in a funky non-cliched chef's outfit with the pirate style mod cuisine black bandana on his head,  mimed to pre-recorded sound effects flowing one into the other on a single soundtrack - Every action of 20 staff members in a Parisian restaurant - from the chop chop chopping, to the stirring, the taking of reservations, the serving of meals, bla bla bla - while staying totally synchronous with his movements to a constantly running soundscape and doing the dialogue of every single person - with each character seamlessly flowing to the next and back for 50 minutes. It's phenomenal! Just youtube a snippet of it.

This year, of course, Gaetan now returned as an  invitee on the Arena programme, which is one of the initiatives through which the festival promotes the development and showcasing of strong South African artistic talent - a significant boon for the notion of art now starting to take care of its own. As part of the Arena, Gaetan now arrived with "Body Language", a super smart one man monologue and mime meander through the world of human body language - well researched, insightful, brilliantly delivered! Physically comical with mental wit. Awesome! And thank goodness it was, becasue otherwise I would have quietly slumped into a peaceful sleep there and then, like I used to in Admin Law lectures. I got into bed at dawn you see.

You never quite know which night it's gonna be; because it always happens so unexpectedly, but it always does - The Long Night at the Long Table - every festival, every year, everyone. The Long Table is to festival what the strawberry and cream cafe is to Wimbledon or the beer tent is to Super 14 rugby. It just wouldn't be fest without the Long Table - eatery, drinkery, all-day, most night gathering spot of the full fest human melange. The Long Table is where you can happily walk in alone at any time of night and be guaranteed of finding someone you know. Last night, after sundowner cocktails and a fantastic Sid Kitchen tribute concert, we landed up at the Long Table - smack bang into what became a combo of vortex-turnstyle where a core group of us had a series of human atoms coming into our social molecule's nucleus and then bouncing off again ... again and again. Boy oh boy did it make for fantastic conversations with interesting people! A few years ago, a visiting musician who had a highly successful run at the festival Jazz, described nights at the Long Table as "Making friends and collecting compliments." He was spot-on. And for me, after having been in this 3D Imax movie wind-tunnel, where a whole night flowed past like a Richard Stanley film, I was getting an impromptu stick control lesson by Kesivan, a good friend and one of the country's top drummers, in front of a log fire at my house, while it poured outside!

Right now Grahamstown is wetter than Noa's abandoned farmhouse, but the sixteen hours of rain have finally stopped, and the late afternoon soft-sun's reminding us all, to take this fest mid-way point quietly. Tomorrow more shows arrive for the second half of festival; and the Long Table and I may have another long night during ArtsFest Act II in us yet.