Ashraf Johaardien: A brief meditation on festivals. Mostly past. And maybe for the future.

Bags already packed by the time I write the wrap article. I’m in the upstairs bedroom of the festival flat. I can hear the sound of the kettle boiling for my final cup of coffee. Starry-eyed is what I call myself in the piece. It’s not entirely untrue.

For three years, towards the end of June and against considerable odds, I was witness to something that materialised that was not there the week before. From the inside.

Artists came from everywhere. Audiences made the long drive to a small Eastern Cape city and arrived looking slightly stunned by their own commitment. Volunteers showed up before anyone asked them to. Technicians rigged venues that were schools and churches eleven months of the year. A director I knew sat outside a venue on opening night, back against the wall, eyes closed, finally still after six months of making. Cafés that had been quiet filled with strangers arguing about what they’d just seen. At midnight the coffee queue was still twenty people long and nobody seemed to mind. I knew how fragile all of it was. I had spent enough time in the sector to understand the forces that work against it. What kept me there was not the institution. It was the annual act of people choosing, against the available evidence, to believe that this was worth doing. That deserves more than curiosity. It deserves to be read carefully.

I took the job because it was interesting. I was curious about the problem the festival presented. I thought I had something useful to offer. I did not move my family to Grahamstown. I was, as far as I can establish, the first person in the history of the National Arts Festival to produce it from a distance. Melville, Johannesburg to Makhanda is roughly a thousand kilometres. I made the journey when the work required it. I returned when it was done. For a long time I understood this as a practical arrangement. Eventually I understood it as something else.

The festival presents itself as the place where South Africa temporarily assembles. What I slowly came to see, working from a desk in Johannesburg, is that the festival was never primarily a place. It was a network. The city was the annual proof of that network. Not its source.

My material was never productions. My material was relationships. I did not arrive knowing this. It took time to understand what the job actually was. The committee was large when I arrived. I remember sitting in rooms with many people trying to agree on what the programme should be. Good instincts. Unconducted. By my second year the committee was five people. That change made coherence possible. Looking back I am grateful someone had the courage to try it.

The grant money ran out long before the programme did. Everything after that depended on relationships. A phone call to an embassy cultural attaché. A programmer in Amsterdam who had seen something at Edinburgh. A co-production agreement built across three emails and a conversation at a conference in France. A visa problem solved at eleven at night by someone who owed someone else a favour. I had learned this way of working early. At Wits I had reintroduced staged readings. Professional actors. New scripts. Playwrights in the room. Audiences as part of the making. No budget to speak of. You create the right conditions and the work arrives. What I was doing at NAF was a version of the same thing at a different scale. Not producing productions. Producing the conditions under which productions could find different audiences.

It took me longer than I expected to see that those are different jobs. A producing institution originates. A circulating institution aggregates and redistributes. Both are legitimate. They require different skills and different ways of measuring what success means. The festival had been moving between these two identities for some time. The story it told about itself had not yet caught up with what it was becoming. I noticed this gradually. I did not say it in any room where it would have mattered. Knowing what a network can hold and what it cannot became part of the job. Not everything needs to be spoken.

In June 2018 Grahamstown was officially renamed Makhanda. The festival continued across both names simultaneously. The streets stayed the same. The venues stayed the same. The institution absorbed the renaming the way institutions absorb most things. By continuing. What stays with me is not the politics of it. It is the reminder that institutions are always temporally split. Their names change faster than their operating systems. There is always a gap between what a thing is called and what it actually does. I had been working in that gap for three years.

I pack the bags and fly home.

The curiosity finds new objects.

But I carry something from then I am only now beginning to be able to articulate. The festival mattered not because it lasted eleven days. It mattered because it changed what happened on the other three hundred and fifty four. The relationships it generated persisted. The work that found its audience in Makhanda in July went somewhere in August. The playwright whose reading drew forty people and a conversation that lasted until midnight revised the script on the drive home. The technician who rigged a church hall for the first time came back the following year knowing something he hadn’t known before. I saw this happen. It is not sentiment. It is how a sector actually sustains itself.

Nation is the word in the title I have been walking toward. Not nation as geography or government. Nation as the set of relationships that make something function across distance and difference. The festival reached for that every year. It assembled the evidence in a small city and then disassembled. What remained was not the programme or the archive or the building. What remained was the changed capacity of the people who had been inside it.

I produced the National Arts Festival from a desk a thousand kilometres away because the festival was already operating at that distance.

Relationships are the venue.

Trust is the infrastructure.

や Ashraf Johaardien is a writer. He was (allegedly) the first person to produce the National Arts Festival from a distance. Visual work: Instagram @ashrafjohaardien. Essays: ashrafjohaardien.substack.com

Ashraf Johaardien
ashrafjohaardien@me.com
M\e. (MODUS ESSENDE • Motus\Essente)
https://ashrafjohaardien.com/

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