South African to lead Amsterdam Fringe

The National Arts Festival Grahamstown joins fellow members of the World Fringe Alliance (WFA) in congratulating South African director, writer, educator, producer and arts leader Rob Murray on his appointment as Artistic Director of the Amsterdam Fringe, a Festival with “deep and meaningful” connections to the South African industry. Murray was announced as the new Director today. He will be replacing Anneke Jansen, who has held the position since the launch of the Amsterdam Fringe ten years ago, and was until recently Chair of the Alliance.

“This is a great feather in the cap for South African theatre, as our directors and producers prove yet again that they are significant forces globally,” Festival CEO Tony Lankester said. “Rob has enormous breadth of experience working across the South African industry – including presenting work on the Fringe, Arena and Main stages of the National Arts Festival and at the Cape Town Fringe, as well as at other major Festivals and institutions. Now he gets to help shape the future direction and footprint of an already exciting and established Fringe Festival in an amazing city, and we’re looking forward to observing and supporting his progress.”

The World Fringe Alliance (WFA), which has a global reach of over 3.5-million audience members, was launched four years ago with Lankester as the founding Chair. Apart from the Festivals in Grahamstown and Amsterdam, its membership includes the world’s largest Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, as well as Brighton, Adelaide, Perth, New York, Hollywood and Prague.

“Through the Alliance we have developed a deep and meaningful partnership with Amsterdam, which has resulted in dozens of South African artists presenting their work in that city, and a similar number of Dutch productions travelling to Grahamstown and Cape Town. Having Rob at the helm of the Amsterdam Fringe will hopefully help ensure that the special relationship between our two Festivals will continue, and that we can create similar opportunities for a new generation of artists,” Lankester said.

Echoing this, Murray pointed to the experiences he’s had in South African theatre as being integral to success in his new role “Growing up, and committing, as an artist in South Africa requires one to be independent, thick-skinned, resourceful, and often bloody-minded. One learns and pushes against systems continuously. Along the way you get to align with like-minded colleagues and co-conspirators, and the Fringe network is strong and vital to the continued development of theatre in all societies. The opportunity to work as part of an amazing team in an incredible city is at once awe-inspiring and humbling,” he said. He referred also to the partnership between the National Arts Festival and Amsterdam Fringe, citing the “special relationship” that has blossomed between the two. “Whatever else happens in the world, relationships such as this demonstrate that Fringe festivals, independently and together, are in a very healthy and exciting place.”

NOTES TO EDITORS

SPONSORS
The National Arts Festival is grateful to its presenting sponsors: Standard Bank, the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund, the Department of Arts and Culture, and the Eastern Cape Department of Sports, Recreation, Arts and Culture. City Press and M-Net are our media partners.

ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
The National Arts Festival is an important event on the South African cultural calendar, and the biggest annual celebration of the arts on the African continent. This year it runs from 2 to 12 July 2015 in the small university town of Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. The programme comprises drama, dance, physical theatre, comedy, opera, music, jazz, visual art exhibitions, film, student theatre, street theatre, lectures, craft fair, workshops, tours (of the city and surrounding historic places) as well as a children’s arts festival. As no censorship or artistic restraint has ever been imposed on works presented in Grahamstown, the Festival served as an important forum for political and protest theatre during the height of the apartheid era, and it continues to offer an opportunity for experimentation across the arts spectrum. Its significance as a forum for new ideas and an indicator of future trends in the arts cannot be underestimated.

The World Fringe Alliance is a grouping of nine fringe festivals around the world which collectively reach an audience of more than 3-million people. Alliance members are the festivals in Grahamstown, Hollywood, New York, Edinburgh, Brighton, Prague, Amsterdam, Perth and Adelaide – and Cape Town. See http://www.worldfringealliance.com/

The Amsterdam Fringe Festival is an unselected, untamed and unjuried festival: a celebration of its theatrical madness and independent spirit, and a plea for artistic freedom. Now in its 11th year, the festival lasts 11 days, hosting 80 different performances at over 40 different locations.

Amsterdam Fringe Festival 1-11 September 2016. Applications open in February 2016.
www.amsterdamfringefestival.nl

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Author: Gilly Hemphill from The Famous Idea.
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Director Rob Murray waits outside the NG Kerk Hall before the dress rehearsal of his new mask work Waterline, at the National Arts Festival. Photo: Photo: CuePix/Mia van der Merwe

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