UJ Arts & Culture to present SA SHORTS

"It is a laboratory for new voices and fresh ideas", says director Alby Michaels. "Works were selected from an open call for playwrights to submit previously unpublished and unproduced short plays. The works selected are ambitious, fresh, playful, engaging, energising, provocative and powerful."

SA SHORTS is deeply rooted in a passion for South African theatre - whether from our young playwrights or the director, Michaels, who combines forces with assistant directors, Motlatji Ditodi and Rethabile Mothobi, to create something that will convince audiences once again that theatre is alive now more than ever.

A platform for emerging playwrights

Ashraf Johaardien, who conceptualised SA SHORTS recalls, "The first production I saw at the UJ Arts Centre as the new Head of Arts & Culture, less than a year ago, was Far Off Off-Broadway, uncomfortably truncated to the unintelligible acronym FOOB; basically an evening of short new American plays presented as a production." Johaardien explains that the American connection felt tenuous despite a good relationship that had been built with the OOB (Off Off-Broadway) organisers through the UJ Arts & Culture collaboration with them on the project.

"But I saw in FOOB the unique opportunity to create a platform for new, emerging and established South African playwrights, without the pressure of commercial constraints or the box-office bottom line," he says. That was the genesis of SA SHORTS which premièred at the National Arts Festival's Student Theatre Festival in Grahamstown, the expanded version of which comes home to the UJ Arts Centre Theatre.

SA SHORTS premièred four plays - Dance the Dance by Tristan Jacobs; Kill Me, Please! by Rhea MacCallum; Metaphorically Speaking by Zanandi Botes; and The Opening by Rob K Baum at the National Arts Festival.

A further two plays, Losing the Plot by Anthony Akerman and The Wave by Renos Spanoudes, will be added to the production which opens at the UJ Arts Centre Theatre, Kingsway Campus in August. Performances are from 2 to 11 August 2012 and bookings are at Computicket.