ReRouting Arts Festival by Tegan Peacock

​ReRouting Arts Festival
An explanation by Tegan Peacock (Festival director)
ReRouting Arts Festival is a site-specific multi-disciplinary arts festival that uses alternate public spaces around the city of Pietermaritzburg. The festival aims to foster a community spirit within the city while promoting a culture of art. People from all walks of life are invited to attend unique audience experiences where they are able to interact with art, the artists and each other.  We aim to burst the individual bubbles that people enclose around themselves and break through stereotypes within the city surrounding people and spaces. The festival strives to wake up the city of PMB and its people, to disrupt the monotony of day to day life and create safe spaces for dialogue, interaction and experiences. This festival provides a means to reclaim our city and its spaces for its people and its artists.
We hosted dynamic Malagasy dancer and choreographer, Julie Iarisoa, for the duration of the festival. Julie ran interactive and energetic dance workshops, sharing her movement, experiences and creating spaces to learn and exchange with learners from a number of different local schools. She also collaborated with local KZN artists (Flatfoot Dance Company, Lorin Sookool, JC Zondi and Tshediso Kabulu) to create two new stimulating works that were performed as part of the festival programme. This created room for networking, collaboration and shared learning between all the artists involved.
Local PMB muralist Jono Hornby, recent winner of the International Public Art Festival, created two spectacular murals over the festival week. He guided and inspired learners from Sukuma High School, helping him to create and paint a wall mural for their school. The other was situated on the corner of a busy street in the city centre. The festival aims to encourage collaboration and bore witness to a number of exciting works presented by local artists, including a collaborative electro acoustic music performance by artists Francis Mennigke and Wayne Reddiar which transported the audience to a different sensory plane using sound and light.
Throughout the festival the events aimed to engage the public with art and its creators. We enjoyed public art creations, artist collaborations that evolved before our eyes and were able to engage with individual artists and their creative processes. This created an accessibility for both the public and the artists themselves that lends itself towards eliminating any fear of the unknown or lack of understanding and attempts to open up the arts and its processes to becoming more accessible and engaging.
We, as a festival, question what has up until now been prescribed as the norm and aim to find and represent a new norm for how art, theatre, music and dance are represented and experienced by its audiences.
ReRouting Arts Festival would not have been possible without the support and enthusiasm of many of our local artists and businesses and for this we are truly grateful.
ReRouting Arts Festival was supported by an ANT Mobility Grant from Pro Helvetia Johannesburg financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), The Floating Outfit Project in association with the National Arts Council, our media sponsor The Witness and in association with The Tatham Art Gallery. We would like to thank all our sponsors for their generous support of ReRouting Arts Festival and sharing in our vision.
 
Light in a time of blackouts
An opinion by Yves Vanderhaeghen (Editor of The Witness)
It was one of those moments in which the world just explodes out of its bounds with energy and possibilities.
It’s not often I go to town at night. If you go along West Street, a friend said to me recently, there are no street lights. It’s all dark. Yes, said another, it’s quite eerie. I like cities by night, for the people and for the lights, except, when there are no lights people tend to retreat to where they might find some, and then it’s not so much fun. And then you lose interest, you get out of the habit and opt for anti-social alternatives like television.
Last Thursday, I did venture out, and I even took my 81-year-old mother along. Down Sweetwaters Road, along Victoria. There was light ahead, and then there wasn’t. Then I realised, 6pm, load shedding. What had drawn me out of my nocturnal refuge was the launch of ReRouting Arts Festival, which was creating a bit of a buzz. On the bill were dancing, music, a collaborative painting gig with Brent Dodd and Siyabonga Sikosana, craft beer from Clockwork Brewhouse (you have to try it, although, mea culpa, I was more in the mood for pink gin), and a vegan bite if you’d missed supper, as I had.
But, storm clouds were gathering over the hill and the power was out, and the mood was wondering whether to darken or not and the crowd was small and a resigned sigh of “Oh Maritzburg” was starting to form.
There was no need for despair. The organiser has a tent for the storm, which never came, and a generator for power. The crowd grew, the music mingled with the generator’s hum and no one minded. The stage lights came up, and the dance was on.
This was no ordinary stage. By day it’s a parking lot. If you’ve been redecorating your house you’ve probably parked there to your paints form Hall’s. It forms part of the Worq space, which calls itself a “hyperlocalised community centre for business people”. But for the evening it was a place for the arts. It was open, it was free, and it was exotic.
It was one of those moments in which the world just explodes out of its bounds with energy and possibilities. It also felt desperately ephemeral. I wanted to bottle it, to hawk it around the city so that everyone could get a bit, so that the dark streets and the wan walls and the empty eyes of the city hall could get their mojo back. I loved that it was taking place in the city, in plain view, not in some hermetic enclave, sealed by money and ease and privilege, white or otherwise. Most important was that it was happening in the first place, when just about any other mention of Maritzburg has to do with dysfunction and paralysis and rot of some description. The stuff that saps hope and energy.
Some people, however, see all of this urban decay and don’t just slump into a moan, because the need to do something to fix things is just too urgent to indulge the despair.
Who are these creatures of optimism? The guiding force behind ReRouting Arts Festival, and remember her name, is Tegan Peacock. She has a day job, although you wouldn’t guess from the amount of time she spent on pulling this festival together. The first I knew about her was when she walked into my office to present a very ambitious vision of art in the city and to ask if The Witness would back it. The vision, we share: to revitalise Maritzburg. So yes, we backed it. It had happenings in Hilton and the townships, in noisy Victoria Road and in the Tatham gardens. Even in the basement parking lot of Parklane Spar. It brought together dancers and musicians from Durban and Maritzburg and Madagascar, artists from Mpophomeni and Edendale, young and old, black and white. As I said, there’s no ambition-deficit here, and it ran mostly on volunteers and raw creativity.
An ambition like this is no to just about the performance, about the thrill of the moment and getting a shot of culture. It’s about the need to lay down new urban neural pathways, the realisation that things happen when things happen, that people connect when they have cause to get together.
The degradation of the public sphere, and the literal loss of public space to crime and official carelessness, make it hard sometimes to re-imagine how it works, how to put everything together in a way that’s good and inspiring for everyone. Someone was overheard saying she hadn’t sat on the grass at the Tatham gardens for many years. That’s what it’s about. Reclaiming the city one patch at a time, street corner by street corner.
I sound like proselytiser. What can I say. This young energy is infectious. There has to be light after Eskom.
 
 
 

Julie Iarisoa and Tshediso Kabulu. Photo by Estelle Sinkins 2019

Opening event. Photo by Ian Carbutt 2019

Mural. Photo by Jono Hornby 2019

Public art collaboration. Photo by Ian Carbutt 2019

Author

Tegan Peacock started her dance training in Classical Ballet. On completion of Matric she studied for her BMus (dance) degree at the University of Cape Town’s School of Dance, majoring in Classical Ballet, Contemporary Dance, Dance History, Benesh Movement Notation (with Distinction) and Classical Piano.
In 2013 Tegan relocated to Pietermaritzburg where she helped to co-found contemporary dance company, ReRouted Dance Theatre. Both individually and with collaborators, they have choreographed and performed on numerous arts platforms around the country, including Dance Umbrella (JHB), Jomba! Contemporary Dance Festival (DBN), Baxter Dance Festival (CTN) and also won a 2016 Standard Bank Ovation Award at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival for BIRD/FISH and continued to perform on the Arena Programme in 2018 with her production Clothes maketh (wo)man 
Through contemporary dance Tegan has participated and collaborated with other artists from many artistic fields and been lucky enough to be a member of residency programmes that were mentored by the Floating Outfit Project (Boyzie Cekwana and Desiré Davids), Studios Kabako (Faustin Linyekula) and Marcel Gbeffa (Benin).