Business funding in South African Theatre

By: Jessica Farley

South African theatre has a difficult legacy which, under the circumstances, is to be expected. Throughout the 20th century and Apartheid, the majority of the population had their theatrical flourishes repressed and for those who fell into the category of the haves, a great deal of their efforts to create relevant theatre centred on the struggle were squashed too. For many years any sort of local theatre scene was discouraged and South Africans were forced to turn to international sitcoms and Hollywood movies.

Fourteen years on and fighting tooth and nail for our continued democracy, South Africa has seen an explosion of creativity, with players being able to stretch their wings and explore all amounts of subjects and avenues. However, the culture of South Africa is not geared around live entertainment and through what has come before us, we just don’t seem to get the idea of theatre and live music being an important and relevant way of spending evenings and weekends. This mentality coupled with a growing (but still small amount) of grass roots encouragement means that the bright new stars are struggling for their footing and those who are able to make a career of it are the lucky few.

Funding, coupled with the lack of the theatre goer’s mentality, is one of the main problems. The nature of being a country straddling the first and third world divide means that the survival of our numbers are of paramount importance. Fair enough. However, that means that the majority of art funding cannot be expected to come from the government or indeed, it seems, the ones who hold the purse strings but have no vision or foresight in the towers of the national lottery. In order to sustain any sort of momentum, the responsibility of new theatre production has fallen on the shoulders of the country’s three largest festivals: the privately-funded ABSA Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in Oudsthoorn, the Aardklop Arts Festival in Potchefstroom and the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, Those festivals receive the majority of their funding from public reserves and the initiative is driven forward not by a country-wide and governmental focussed drive, but rather through individual companies pushing and pulling their weight.

The main players in South African theatre funding these days are: SBSA (visual arts, music with emphasis on jazz, arts in general through Grahamstown festival), ABSA (Arts Festival Klein Karoo, big musicals and visual arts), FNB (Contemporary dance and visual arts), Nedbank (Arts & Culture trust), Investec (big musicals), Rand Merchant Bank (music), Sasol (classical music), MTN (visual arts, music), Vodacom (popular forms of music), Old Mutual (music – general: doing big outdoor shows at Emmerentia dam/Kirstenbosch).

At present, several big multi-national companies are pulling their weight. What is gratifying to see is that it is not just the big players but smaller companies that have also taken an interest in the arts. Business & Arts South Africa (BASA) have founded the Supporting Grant Scheme with funding from the Department of Arts and Culture, and aims to encourage and increase business sponsorship of the arts. The initiative is described on their website - http://www.basa.co.za/ - as follows: It is designed as an incentive scheme for business sponsors, not as another source of public subsidy for arts organisations. For this reason, the possibility of a BASA grant should form part of the negotiations from the start between the applicant arts organisation and a potential sponsor. In this way, the multiple possibilities emerging from a partnership can be properly discussed and explored.

It is not the conventional way of doing things and in comparison to established arts countries like the UK, where funding is far easier to come by, South Africa does pose more problems. But, the point is, there are ways and means and the theatre culture of South Africa is bubbling under the surface. In a country rife with entrepreneurs and built on the back of its people’s passion perhaps it is time to see this dearth of funds as a shrewd new form of investment or, at the very least, something to keep on supporting and watching for future opportunities.