catch-22

I find myself in a bit of a dilemma, a catch-22 situation. Catch-22 is a frustrating situation in which one is trapped by contradictory regulations or conditions.

I’ve often thought that what Cape Town needs is an annual theatre festival that caters to more experimental fringe theatre rather than the same old tried and tested boring well-made plays. I think I’d be good at organizing such a thing.

Now, there is a group of us trying to organize a mini theatre festival from the 17th to the 24th of December. We call ourselves The Rooster Collective and our aim is to present a triple bill of young, new plays, one of which will be ‘Writing Anne’. The mini festival will kick off with an arty party full of performance art, visual art and audio art. The venue is Distrix Café in the heart of the legendary suburb District 6. This new live-performance venue in Cape Town has a major ‘wow’ factor: The stage is the foreground to an immense rock garden overflowing with indigenous plant life and a waterfall. In the background lies the glorious Table Mountain.

We have been having funding meetings and marketing meetings non-stop where everyone meets at my flat and I feed them and we go round in circles speaking about the same issues and the same far-fetched dreams without ever really reaching our goals for the meeting though everyone always seems to be saying, ‘guys, lets focus!’.

I can’t remember how I agreed to get involved with this. It all started when one day I said to this guy Alex, ‘hey, you are putting on your play again at the end of the year?’
And he said, ‘yes, why don’t you put yours on and we can do a double bill’
And I said, ‘cool’
And he said, ‘we should have a meeting…’
Then ‘suddenly’ we are launching an annual theatre festival framed with wild performance parties at either end…

The problem is; I don’t think I like theatre very much anymore. I don’t have the passion and energy it takes to work in this industry, at least at the moment. There is no money in it so you can’t pay yourself or your actors, when you finally have a show ready for performance there are so few people who actually support ‘fringe’ theatre that even if you hand out flyers and talk to people and put notices in the paper and put up posters and run screaming through the streets, no-one really comes. So you have to really want to put on a play and at the moment I really don’t.

So that's my catch-22 and we’ll see how it goes. I don’t want to let anyone down by pulling out of the festival but I probably shouldn’t be getting more involved with it either if it’s not what I want to be doing.