"Oh hello Shakespeare"

So I was lucky enough to grab some time from the incredibly busy Tiffani Cornwall. When this vivacious bombshell of a lady is not at Wits hustling through her final year of her Dramatic Arts degree, she is out designing some production, casually having meetings with the Education department or running several theatre festivals at once. But it was as her role as the Gauteng Coordinator of the Shakespeare Schools Festival that I approached her for this interview. The festival allows schools to select a Shakespearean play of their choice and then grooms them during a process that results in a performance of the play in either the Joburg or Soweto theatre.

What is the history of the Shakespeare Schools Festival?

Cool. It’s a festival that was initiated in England. And it was just a festival to create a platform on which school kids could perform Shakespeare. It then slowly developed. It was brought to South Africa in 2009 by a Russian woman, our director of the festival, Kseniya Filinova. She started in Cape Town with one school and then moved into Joburg in 2011 with two schools. This year we’re sitting at 11 schools; 4 from Soweto Theatre, 7 from the Joburg Theatre. I was part of one of those pilot schools and it was pitched to us as a socio-educational festival where we got to interact with the professionality of the stage. It was also directly linked to the fact that in South Africa Shakespeare is a part of our English syllabus. So it helped with learning and understanding and falling in love with what we understood to be Shakespeare. The festival owns the rights of most if not all of his play texts specifically. So when they register they apply for a text. Generally it’s the teacher that decides. We have some schools where the teacher has filtered the festival into their curriculum. So only the grade 11 drama students can perform and then the grade 10 drama students are the crew for that year; which is really smart and the exact way the festival runs because it’s a lot about the seniors teaching the juniors. Now it’s very drastically developed into a festival that has translations of Shakespeare texts, making it applicable in the 21st century in South Africa in our current context. It is very focused on empowerment of students and young people who want to become artists through teaching and opportunity creation. So ya it’s a very South African culture, upliftment- driven type of festival.

Is the end product of the festival a competition or just a showcase?

It’s not a competition it’s a showcase. How it works is that the kids rehearse for whatever play they have chosen up until the showcase where we do a tech run with them. So ya, it ends in a performance and with a participation certificate and I mean exposure more than anything else.

What do you mean by exposure:

So on the day of the performance, with the dress rehearsal they get to watch each other’s performances so there’s a lot of like sit with someone from a school you don’t know and get to know them. And to look at how other schools interpreted the same piece so that’s part of this teaching thing. It helps them understand the text better because it’s that practical experience of the thing you’re doing theoretically. We also assign professional directors to work with them in the weeks just before the performance.

How is the festival funded?

Uhm I think, on love, at this moment because there is no way we are getting enough money to cover what we do. There is no way we get paid enough but I’ll do it every day for the rest of my life for love. And outside of the love, Educape in Cape Town has been one of our long-term sponsors. And now we have a French bank who sponsors us because they were looking for a “project” in South Africa to do. And I have a very particular understanding of overseas funders, I super appreciate it but, the mentality that it comes in with is ‘ah shame the poor South Africans.’ But we need the funding and someone to believe in the project, you know. And I’m grateful for it because it gives me a platform on which to show them that their money is not for poor, silly South African kids; that they’re actually improving a life. Our festival director spends her whole life applying for funding every day. We are yet to get funding from the South African department of Arts, or education for that matter. But I think we just keep trying.

What is the quality of the performances? Why go and watch these kids?

Such a brilliant question because I hated Shakespeare so much and I was like ‘I’m never gonna go watch this rubbish.’ So I encourage them to do their own interpretations of it. And often going to watch them is not about the quality but because of what comes out of it. Watching what they got out of it is absolutely satisfactory. The reason why I think theatre goers should be watching it is because it gives you a good understanding of what’s coming up in South Africa. Why are these kids linking Macbeth directly to our political situation? And how come a seventeen year old can think like that? It’s the thing about Shakespeare and what everyone says ‘it’s because his writing is universal’ which is the most common response I’ve ever heard but it’s true. And the fact that those themes and those ideas and those thoughts are applicable every single day is pretty cool. There’s a rejuvenation in his words, that things can come alive in whichever way they say it. And I think also the quality very particularly is dependent on how long they’ve been in the festival for. It’s like any theatre, the more pieces you watch, the better your work becomes because you’re influenced by more things. And as a theatre maker you can learn from both the bad and the good, which is great! I love the sense of newness that’s always on the horizon.

How do the skills learned in the process benefit these students off-stage and out of the classroom, in the ‘real world.’

I think the social transfer of skills, more than other stuff – how to work with other people. You know the artistic industry is about that, it’s a people industry. Even if they’re not choosing to go into the arts industry and just thought ‘hey this would be a fun project to do,’ at some point they’ll know how to deal with people and tech runs will teach them to deal with stressful situations. And learning about how other people do things differently, for me is probably one of the skills that they get to take out there in the real world. Also, there’s this thing about passion which you get taught with this festival which is really strange because it’s not something someone can give you, it’s not a gift. It’s just a mindset. Its gonna be really difficult before it great. But that difficult part is where you build passion and character. And then also language skills. One of my adopted schools from Joburg who are not all by first language English speaking kids, come out there and say words in Shakespeare that I’ve miss pronounced and then smashed it, smashed the performance! Last year I watched my festival director cry and cry while watching a performance from an adopted school. It was amazing to watch that unfold because, there must be growth. So the skills transfer is actually making a difference. Cause if it wasn’t then our schools wouldn’t keep coming back and our festival wouldn’t keep running year after year.

In a climate where current artists are graduating and not finding work is it wise to create more artists?

I think it’s such a brilliant question and flip I’ve been through so many interviews and no one’s actually asked it. I think being an artist who’s about to graduate and panicking about not having work is the realest feeling ever. But, yes, I do think there’s a point in it. The economic and even just social understanding in South Africa is that the entrepreneurial business is where we are supposed to grow. And the festival can create a mindset and for lack of a more sophisticated word, “hustlers” – kids who can just hustle. So exactly! Entrepreneurs. I don’t want to go along with this ‘artists should do things for free’ mentality and ‘artists are the poor people and will only be successful if we marry engineers rubbish.’ So comes the idea that I can do it and I can do it cause I love it. And the beauty about my work compared to an engineer’s work is it’s not a job, it’s my lifestyle. And I’m creating and improving and encouraging a lifestyle. The festival and its organizers and everyone involved are motivating people who go against the grain. Cause I think education is easier when it’s done artistically. I think I can learn better when I see it, or when I’m in it. Then I look at the text and go “oh, duh!” When I was in grade 10 they were tryna shove Shakespeare down my throat and I hated it! Until I performed it, on stage with Hamlet and then I was like ‘oh… Hello… Shakespeare!’ (she says all flirtatiously.) Initially before I started it would never have been a career that I would have encourage, I just wouldn’t. And now I’m like actually, if I can do something with it, everyone can do something with it. Maybe there’s no space or actually maybe there’s shit loads of space. The corporate world needs artists to do things for them. The medical world – flip at Wits right now the drama students are hired to help the medical students practically understand things. So ya this ‘all the world’s a stage’ thing, Shakespeare was onto something, it just took us a while to catch onto it.

What does the future look like for the festival?

All nine provinces in South Africa! With all eleven languages translated. Cause right now we’re only sitting on 2 0r 3 official translations and those only came in last year. We’ve had Xhosa poets; because Shakespeare’s a poetic language; you can’t get a normal linguist to translate because then it will be colloquial and it takes the essence of the writing out. I think we’ve got Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa and English. So ya the plan is expansion and maybe even for me on a bigger level it’s growing the arts, growing the amount of kids who matriculate wanting to be artists. You know, shifting the culture in the way they think and personal understanding behind what it is to be an artist and not this career with a stigma attached to it. I personally wanna grow women in the career particularly and not so much as performers but as technical people as well. The ability for us to be so close to the youth and be able to affect a mindset change is huge. I mean we opened up the festival to primary schools two years ago and that’s giant because the way an eleven year old thinks compared to the way somebody who is in grade 11 thinks is hugely different. If I can affect the mindset of the 11 year old so that by the time he is in grade 11 the thought process is completely different about what you’re doing and putting practical and theory together, then why not.

Performance details

http://www.ssfsa.co.za/

Tickets are R50 and will be available on the theatre’s websites.

http://www.joburgtheatre.com/

Joburg Theatre: The shows run from 7-11 September at 19:00 with 3-4 performances/schools per night.

http://www.sowetotheatre.com/

Soweto Theatre: The shows run on the 14th and 15th of September with 2 performances a day. The performance times are still to be released and can be found on the website.

You can also follow the festival on social media.

#SouthAfrica #theatre #education #festival #Shakespeare