Inspired by a YouTube video, a dinner party conversation and a word spoken by her father, this year’s Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner for Theatre, Jemma Kahn, has been there, done that – and had a drink or two along the way.
Creating and performing the Japanese form of street theatre, kamishibai or “paper theatre”, since returning from a two-year stint in Japan after graduating from Wits where she studied fine arts and drama, Kahn describes her works as “perverse”, “compassionate” and “camp”.
This year is no different, as Kahn’s The Borrow Pit premieres at the National Arts Festival.
“If your brain is sticky, then anything you come into contact with can get stuck in there and grow into an idea. My play this year came from a YouTube video of an artist’s interview, a story I heard at a dinner party and a word my dad taught me that congealed together,” Kahn said.
Kahn performed her first show back in 2012 – The Epicene Butcher and Other Stories for Consenting Adults – which was, in her own words, a “last-ditch attempt to try something”.
Directed by John Trengove, the show was a sell-out success and was nominated for a Fleur du Cap and a Naledi award in 2014.
Last year was the third and final run of her second kamishibai production, We Didn’t Come to Hell for the Croissants: Seven Deadly New Stories for Consenting Adults, directed by Lindiwe Matshikiza.
The production was workshopped as part of the 2015 Johannesburg Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale.
It went on to travel extensively, garnering both local and international acclaim.
Looking back at workshopping the piece in Venice, Kahn said the experience was “very bohemian”, particularly while performing in an old butchery.
“In Venice old means like 400 years old. A 400-year-old butchery to debut a perverse cabaret? I mean, come on. I remember rolling up the holey Persian carpet [out of the house we were staying in] and carrying it to the butchery through the streets, feeling very bohemian,” Kahn said.
Self- proclaimed non-risk taker Kahn said this time round she, like her subjects, has thrown caution to the wind.
“It was advised that I work from an existing script for the Standard Bank Young Artist piece. I did not do this, writing from scratch [and I am not a writer]. This play will also be the first time I have directed my own work [another thing I was advised not to do], and I will perform in it as well.
“In one scene a character I play needs to kill another character, played by me – one of many, many things I’m not exactly sure how to achieve.
“But ... it feels absolutely right that the subject matter of this play be dealt with in a risky way. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m taking a risk.”
Kahn’s ambitious work The Borrow Pit sees the narrator using sets of illustrated boards in a miniature stage-like device to accompany different scenes and is based on the lives of 20th Century British painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Both painters had muses who helped them on their way to remarkable fame.
Kahn said the production asked the question “is art more important than people?”
“We can pretend that we make art for ourselves, but audiences are essential. We want to reach out our proverbial hands and stroke the proverbial arms of an audience.
“Art is a vital component of a functional society, but then again, food is more important than art,” Kahn quipped. Looking back at her festival years, she said although The Borrow Pit “might puncture my career”, being honoured with a Standard Bank Young Artist Award meant people valued what she made, “at least for the time being”.
Asked about highs and lows over the years performing at the Fest, Kahn said: “I always think of Grahamstown as cold, and I always have a cold. “I've also come to realise that I make the mistake of getting really drunk the night before the last show, which means the last performance is always a disaster”.
The Epicene Butcher and Other Stories for Consenting Adults was awarded the Critic’s Choice at Amsterdam Fringe 2012, an Archangel Award at the Brighton Fringe in 2014, and was nominated for best theatre piece at FringeWorld Perth.
Kahn was also named as one of the Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans in the Arts in 2013. She was part of the Centre for the Less Good Idea’s first season in 2017, where her films Somebody You’ve Already Painted Many Times from Memory and Beast Fur were screened.
The Borrow Pit is at the Rhodes Box today and tomorrow at 2pm and 8pm.