So day one of the Grahamstown National Arts Festival started off with a BANG! Literally. Last night I watched a drummer with 40 hands; or so it sounded; while the two that I could see looked happily, almost nonchalantly, bored. He was that good! They were all that good! A sextet called The Clearing. David Ledbetter's ensemble of the best young jazz musicians in the country - guitar, sax, trumpet, piano, double bass, drums. Breathtaking! The started off like Dave Brubeck and ended up like The Who. Musical mayhem with the unmistakable hand that holds control. Today, many of those same musicians were giving a jazz workshop to university and high school musicians on ensemble playing. Using just each particpants name sung differently, they created a song. The room shone. And it wasn't just the soft winter afternoon light flashing off a trumpet.

Right now, as I write this, a zillion worlds collide around me. Remember yesterday, (and if you are gonna read my fest blogs, you may as well start from fest day one and we can play together for a whole ten days), I said that fest entails drama, dance, comedy, jazz, etc. plus plus? Well here's the plus plus: entire festivals, conferences and workshop series within the overall fest itself - on everything from comic art (cartooning, graffiti ...), to African literature, the political economy, screenwriting, playwriting, jazz, classical music and and and!

Ultimately, the magical magnificence of an event such as the National Arts Festival is just how much contribution and participation it elicits from human beings as disparate from each other as a rural Xhosa girl in a traditional dance group, the trombonist in the symphony orchestra my mom's watching tomorrow, and the New York avante garde filmaker discussing the discourse of silence in Fellini's work - Thousands of people, thoughts, hopes, dreams, anxieties, profiiencies, hours of practice,  minutes of glory, complexes, fatal flaws and greatest strengths, all congealing, coalescing, converging, becoming part of a reverberating molecule within many will never meet, but all have added to. And it's a different festival for everyone. Every single one of us here for a different reason, seeing different shows, taking in different experiences, presenting different parts of indfividual and combined creativity - looking for different meaning in what each of us is doing, or not doing, here. Even the streetkids paint their faces white for fest and mime for their money - in fact, a workshop is run teaching them the basics of mime as fest begins. Poor things. Some are still inexperienced and can't help but break their supposedly self-imposes silence with "R2 please boss". Perfecting performance takes time. But they're in it, and it's grand. So am I. My sister and I perform together on Monday as part of the Arts Lounge initative between local musicians and the Rhodes Arts and Drama Departments. But more on that closer to the time. More, much more soon. Tomorrow. Off to throw myself back in. Thank you so much for making me so excited about sharing this fest with you! Thank you so much for the excitement - fullstop!  

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