Please disrupt me

Machine Makes Man: There is everything right about this acclaimed piece.

Standing ovation, multi-media visual extravaganza, hi-tech, loveable characters and wonderful actors, just all fine.

But.

At the back of my mind there was this irritating thought that the concept they were exploring has been done. Pinched perhaps by movies and TV series.

Limitless, Lucy, Her, they all kept coming to mind.

Which brings me to the point of originality and festivals, especially this one which is finding traction among young creatives (and a few dangling ballies) who must reach with difficulty down into the mysterious, unfathomable source to find that originality.

That’s how they break into the closed shop of theatre-makers we love to follow and follow forever.

So, if you want a safe ticket, if tyrannical tech and brainwashing elites and humans trying to wrench back their humanity from fascist, faceless despots is your thing, then Machine Makes Man is for you.

But, again but, I want to be where the new shoot is punching out of the earth, I want to be on our community frontline, I want to be part of our #SouthAfrican generation of explorers. I want to see creative courage and madness, drive and push us into the new territory, new “space” (sometimes more like outer space). Change is blowing all around us, rising like cumulonimbus.

Today, our youth are in a cultural, socio-economic battle to ensure next-generation survival.

After a 22-year doze, they are up and about. Indeed, they are awake and alive! They may not feel they were born free, but they are certainly behaving like they were. Thank you!

The rainbow is gone, the sun has fallen and in the murky gloaming, the half light, they find themselves being ruled by a fundamentally corrupt right-wing tending, nationalist elite which must increasingly rely on propaganda to exist.

Factions and infighting, plots, plans, spin and spit. What kind of parents are these slouching towards Bloemfontein?

Young artists find themselves in a storm of new material, new stuff.

It is there to be collected by the bucketful. The air is moving, the grass is waving and shaking, everything is rich with dissent, with unsanctioned, unsanitised questions and demands. The constitution is being pushed, probed and the liars and looters are outed.

That’s why I’d rather be getting off my heinie to give the student doccie #Disrupt a standing ovation for taking me somewhere dangerous and thrilling and exquisitely new, rather than treading the mill with ever-so done NYC stuff.

Sacrilegious? Disrupt that!