Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #22 Patterns of Connection

Ever since the pandemic began last year, drama pedagogues have been attempting to understand what it means for theatre pedagogy. In the world of Zoom, what are they preparing their students for?

While pedagogues have found unique solutions to this, we took the opportunity to look at how the pandemic can change how arts organizing and organizations can be reimagined in this time of rupture. What has it looked like in the past? What are the features that resonate with us? Which ones can be replicated in future as a more sustainable and healthier formation?

To ruminate on these questions, we had Rucera Seethal, a South African arts manager and Artistic Director of National Arts Festival (Makhanda, South Africa) sharing her thoughts at a recent Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) conversation.

Seethal has also worked with Chimurenga, a pan-African magazine of ideas, art and politics, and at the Johannesburg regional office of Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council funding body.

Chimurenga

Chimurenga, a Shona word that loosely translates to ‘struggle for freedom’, was Seethal’s first foray into political and organizational “schooling”. “I wandered into that space in my very early 20s and sunk my teeth in, slowly and surely,” she describes.

The pan-African publication on arts, culture and politics from and about Africa, and its diasporas, was founded by Ntone Edjabe, its editor, in 2002. It took a few years before they received grant funding, tracing a unique journey over the first few years.

“I really enjoyed working in the early days and figuring out the organization structure, the projects we would work on, what structure we can give it, what’s the best way to make it function,” Seethal shares.

What helped Seethal in the process is the clear vision, direction and political location that Chimurenga had since the beginning. “This was a very important and central grounding place for the project, for everything that it did, or it’s tried to do. It helped us to navigate different situations,” she describes.

While we live in a world today where the digital medium has given a new meaning to possibilities of collaborating with people from different parts of the world, Chimurenga has been doing so for a long time. “We would have conversations around projects and what we’re doing, with collaborators in different parts of the world,” Seethal says. “So, you can go beyond the confinements that, say, your particular geography or your particular background or history may endow. I thought it was very important for the ideas in the work that we perceive.”

Apart from the magazine itself, Chimurenga embarked on several projects such as the Chimurenga Library, Chimurenganyana, the PASS Pan African Space Station, Pilgrimages, and the African Cities Reader. Many of these projects were birthed from a vision that there wasn’t necessarily a way to do it. “So, a lot of the making was about carving out the way that didn’t exist, and it was this is the kind of mode of practice that I really learned at Chimurenga,” Seethal shares, adding that the practice was to move through the problem, rather than around it.

Pro-Helvetia

During her stint at Pro Helvetia Johannesburg as programme manager, she was responsible for the performing arts programme in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. It was a place where she could obtain a steady salary, work with a budget so that they could plan for three years ahead. They also had a travel budget, which she describes as “the cream on the top”, for it is quite costly to travel on the continent. But, more than anything, what she enjoyed most about Pro Helvetia is that it was a small, tightly knit team that worked well together.

“I think it’s been quite important over the years, and maybe it is something I seek, which is that relationship building – within a team but also with people who you work with. Human relations are the basis of most work, and it is a gift being able to do and to dream together,” she says.

Speaking of her involvement with the performing arts programme in the SADC region, Seethal shares it was her favourite part of the Pro Helvetia programme. It is a fund for south African artists across 16 countries for mobility exchange, research development and organizational support.

While it is now in its final year, when Seethal joined Pro Helvetia in 2013, she, along with Joseph Gaylard, head of the Johannesburg division, had the opportunity to revise the programme. “There was an interesting support in constructing micro grants and organizational funding in such a way that the impact would be that of network building,” she describes.

They offered a range of grants from $3000 to $4000 that went into mobility or research and development, without needing an outcome or needing something to be produced for actual movement or for production. Additionally, they also offered three-year funding programs for some organisations in different parts of the SADC region.

Seethal got to witness the development of ideas, works and relationships among artists. “Over the years, it was really interesting to see the progression and trajectory of projects, or artists who, say, went to a different city for a research and development grant and met people. A year or two later, you see how that project grew, how that relationship grew,” she says.

With the NAF, a 48-year-old institution in South Africa, making a change or being responsive takes longer, feels Seethal. “And in a way – not without acknowledging the devastation of the pandemic – it was always a good thing for the National Arts Festival because the pandemic forced it to change. It forced things to collapse, it forced things to break, it forced us to have to reconsider,” she adds.

Network building

For the future, Seethal imagines artist-led spaces, be it physical spaces that is created very specifically within a context or community, or a festival that has a momentary manifestation and then disappears.

“What is very interesting for me about these spaces, is that largely, they’d be independent spaces. They would be run by having an artistic person who is carrying a vision and who is leading, and often off the back of their own earnings as an individual artist,” she explains.

There is not a lot of support for the arts on the African continent, Seethal believes, and that there are wide, open grounds to set up spaces where artists are starting from scratch in a way, and produce their own work. “But, of course, they aren’t working in isolation,” she adds.

Seethal also imagines such independent artist-led entities to be part of a mycelium-like network – of people, resources, knowledge etc. “It is so much more than a final piece that one is presenting. It is a point where a whole range of things can circulate – people can gather and dialogue with others and a whole range of other functions this entity, structure can facilitate,” she tells.

As the conversation comes to a close, Seethal also suggests that this idea of artist-led networks can also be used for movement of resources, funds and shared opportunities. If we understand an arts network as a complex and dynamic system, then, say, a small injection of funds can have a bigger impact elsewhere. “We can have this organic network of the arts and their influence,” she says, “And we shift to think, how do we fund the network? We can then start to think about different ways of how one could fund.”