Keith Bain

2 months ago | dailymaverick.co.za | Keith Bain

DANCE A too-short run of Cape Ballet Africa’s latest triple bill, Breathwords, includes the world premiere of whispers from within by Dutch choreographer Wubkje Kuindersma, Nacho Duato’s much-acclaimed Remanso, and an expanded version of Kirsten Isenberg’s dreamy, light-as-a-feather Reverie. It is almost shocking what dancing does for the soul.

2 months ago | mg.co.za | Des Erasmus |Keith Bain

Like huge wraiths, their shadows danced on the walls to a haunting soundtrack. Four dancers in identical cropped wigs and tunic dresses repeating sequences of gestures on the large turntable on the performance space. Their movements and rhythms were simultaneously strange and familiar, the music they moved to a synthesis of organic and electronic. An integration of real and digital that in many ways is what life has become.

2 months ago | mg.co.za | Keith Bain

Jerome Barnes is light on his feet. Ridiculously light. I had witnessed the British dancer’s fleet-footedness a few days earlier, during the final dress rehearsal for Giselle, in which he dances the part of Albrecht, a philandering, lovestruck nobleman-in-disguise. In it, Barnes, who has been a dancer for almost 20 years, launched off the stage with that spritely, gravity-defying effortlessness that gives ballet audiences precisely that sense of flight we earthbound humans crave.

2 months ago | dailymaverick.co.za | Keith Bain

THEATRE Forget Goethe, never mind Marlowe: this revival and reworking of the 1995 production of ‘Faustus in Africa!’ is from another dimension. It features live actors, charcoal animations and astonishing puppetry. Helmed by directors William Kentridge and Lara Foot, it’s a wondrous team effort, an astonishing theatrical event that avoids portentousness, yet sparkles with polish, professionalism, and top-notch production values. And is deeply, darkly funny.

Feb 28, 2025 | dailymaverick.co.za | Keith Bain

THEATRE REVIEW For 80 incredible minutes, accompanied by little more than a single piano and your undivided attention, the actors in Thrill Me absolutely own the stage. Starting with the moment that actor John Conrad entered stage left, floorboards creaking underfoot as he ventured across the raised platform before turning to make his appeal to the disembodied parole board represented by the audience, my attention never wavered for an instant.