ODIDIVA RETURNS...and all thats happened since June
Odidiva returns…and all the 0ther 2010 adventures
I feel quite vindicated by my decision to quit performing at Beefcakes from July 2010 – November 2010. I love this Queer City, the Mother City, but she is as sweet in summer as she is bitter in winter.
The Mother City clearly suffers from a highly temperamental Multiple Personality Disorder. Like a well groom tart, the weather clears every Summer as she opens her legs to the international guests berthing momentarily at her various ports of call. In Autumn the South Easter picks up speed as her MPD borders on Schizophrenia. The temperature jumps from 30 degrees Celsius to 15 degrees and back again, every two hours as isolated scattered showers are observed in every Cape Town Suburb. By Winter her legs have decisively closed, as storms batter ships in Table Bay, with some even getting annually shipwrecked on the sandy banks of Sunset Beach and Bloubergstrand. Her PMS lasts for 6 day stretches as a thunderous dark cloud sits on Table Mountain and the city tolerates sustained, perpetually precipitous precipitation. This is the kind of continuous rain reminiscent of gloomy London and gothic Tokyo, in the classic Michael Douglas film, Black Rain.
As commuters rise to go to work and return home 9 hours later, in the dark, many wonder why we do not adopt Daylight Saving.
As the pendulum swings between 5 days of sunshine and 7 days of wet greyness, film and photographic shoots are either re-rescheduled continuously or cancelled completely. Event planners are suddenly thrown on to the proverbial roulette wheel, unable to predict or contain attendance as Capetonians become more fickle than normal.
The Gay Community becomes a Gay Village as the proverbial 10 degrees of separation becomes an incestuous 4 degrees of separation. Drag Queens turn on each other violently as social cliques tighten membership and withering looks, followed by insults are traded with astonishing regularity.
But the most outrageous farce of the Winter months is the news of restaurants in and around the city dropping like flies as they go belly up and close. Every year the hysteria reaches boiling point when the always untrue news of the demise of Blues restaurant at the The Bay Hotel starts doing the rounds. In 2009 14 restaurants closed in the Mother City. To this day the turnaround of new restaurants at the Harbour Edge building bordering the still unfinished Western Boulevard and Buitengracht Street, is astounding, at a rate of a new restaurant opening every 3months.
It is at this moment in Winter that the Old Money and the Nouveau Riche begin their shopping trips to London, Dubai and New York. Holidays are booked in the perennial favourites Mauritius, Bali, Mozambique and Thailand. The Yuppies attempt cosy getaways in the villages of the Boland, Overberg and the Cedarburg as families grab timeshare holidays in Durban, Ballito, and even Plettenburg Bay. The rest are forced to grin and bear it or go to the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown or the Knysna Oyster Festival with minus Zero degrees at night.
Johannesburg is not really an option except for the allure of sunny days sun tanning at poolsides of The Saxon, The Monarch, Westcliff, The Melrose Arch or Fire and Ice Hotels. Nights are spent cruising and partying at Gauteng superclubs; Babylon, Ramp Divas, Risqué, Lemon 8, Simply Blue and the new Discotec are like honey to a bee, for the Cape Town’s professional gay community. For the majority of this particular demographic, double income couples without kids, resulting in money for recreational use; the highlight of these escapades is Joburg Pride on the first weekend of October.
The official opening Spring Gay Day.
On my return to Cape Town, after attending Joburg Pride, I wrote the following update on Twitter,
‘Woke up with my eyes itchy and swollen, my nose sneezing, my throat scratchy, the weather has a multiple personality disorder and the World Cup stadium has already been written off, I am back in Cape Town.”
This year our Queer City managed to have a better winter than normal, thanks to that aforementioned World Cup and the Cape Town Stadium. Even British actors Alan Cummings and Ian McKellen and Academy Award winner Halle Berry worked in the city. The restaurant mortality rate improved. Event co-ordinators had more than their fill as even Justin Bieber came on holiday at the One & Only celebrity brothel.
Odidiva spent the entire World Cup 2010 headlining the international hit show, Directed by Brett Bailey, HOUSE OF THE HOLY AFRO at the Market Theatre. Attendance was fantastic with Marianne Fassler, HHP, Thandiswa Mazwai, Gloria Bosman and even Steve Hofmeyer coming along with hundreds of Mexicans, Argentineans, Dutch, and English and Ghanaian supporters. The reviews in all media were positively raving with the Mail & Guardian’s Arts Editor Matthew Krause writing,
“Odidiva climbs the stairway to heaven…for a few hours I thought I’d died and gone to heaven…The high priest of the holy house is drag diva Odidi Mfenyana, as the frontline performer “Odidiva” gets to change outfits for just about every number…Odidiva seems to be reaching spiritual catharsis…a disco party entering the risky area of African trance dance.”
House of the Holy Afro in its 6 years touring Europe and Australasia has only performed 3 times on the African continent. In 2007 at the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA), a significant middle finger to the oppressive and homophobic regime there. In 2008 we performed for one unforgettable night, at the OUT THE BOX festival in Cape Town. And then for the entire duration of the 2010 World Cup, House of the Holy Afro took over the legendary Market Theatre.
Opening night was the same day as the opening match between Mexico and South Africa. We woke up and went to sleep to the sound of the Vuvuzela. Traffic was gridlocked and noisy and colourful like a Mardi Gras. Every car displayed South African colours and white grannies had us in stitches attempting to blow Vuvuzelas. The energy was palpable and the spirit, simply sublimely rainbow nation ethereal.
We managed to fit in several promotional performances at Moyo in Melrose Arch where Face of Africa creator and South African fashion industry icon Jan Malan along with “it” fashion designer of the moment, David Tlale could not get enough of our outrageous showcases.
I remained in Jozi for a month after the World Cup to soak up the sun and the club scene, while getting to know South Africa’ Perez Hilton, entertainment and gossip blogger Mika Stefano . If you want to be at the forefront of what is happening in the world of entertainment or the gay community in Gauteng then Mika Stefano is your touchstone. It turns out that he is a huge fan of Odidiva and attended a couple of performances during my last Summer Season at Beefcakes before attending House of the Holy Afro at the Market Theatre. She thoroughly enjoyed the show but she still wanted to see more of ODIDIVA.
House of the Holy Afro then went on tour to Copenhagen, Denmark. In Copenhagen there are more bicycles than people. The only other country to have more bicycles per capita is the People’s Republic of China. Obviously, our mode of transport was cycling on bikes hired for us by our hosts, Republique Theatre, from a company called iBasekili, iBasekili?
I couldn’t help but notice that the spelling looked suspiciously like the Xhosa spelling of the word bicycle. On further investigation it was revealed that the company was part of a charitable service that sent all their old bicycles to the townships of the Eastern and Western Cape for school children to use.
House of the Holy Afro is a high energy song and dance extravaganza featuring traditional, gospel and Afro Pop put to house beats by DJ Dino Moran.
Our routine is such; the cast arrives 2hours before the show opens, to do a 60min physical warm-up; a combination of Pilates, yoga and contemporary dance under the enthusiastic athletic supervision of our choreographer Natalie Fischer. This is followed by a 30min voice warm up session and another 30minutes of soundcheck, make-up & costume mayhem before our diminutive, authoritative Stage/Tour Manager, speaking broken Xhosa slang, orders us up on stage as the curtains open.
The company is called Third World Bungfight, and the name fits this motley crew succinctly. It’s made up of township dwelling performers, a Jewish koegirl choreographer, our aforementioned Muslim Stage manager adhering to the strict spiritual annual fast of Ramadan, a flamboyant Drag Diva headed by the very Left of Centre Director, Brett Bailey.
This has continually been a recipe for a Third World Bunfight on every tour and at the most unexpected and inopportune occasions.
Thankfully, on this tour no company members were lost or left at connecting airports. But the choreographer fell terribly ill with pneumonia. She was booked into the local university hospital where they had under quarantine for 48 hours, due to her African status. Poor Natalie Fischer was relegated to a ward at the far end of the hospital. Her bed and most of the furniture was surrounded if not wrapped in plastic sheeting. Every visitor had to wear protective overalls gloves and accompanying face masks, like she could contaminate us with Bird Flu, Pig Flu and Ebola. It took 2hours cycling to find the hospital in the rain.
At this point cast members were gatvol with all the physical exertion between 90minutes hardcore performance, 60 minute body firming warm-ups and the 40 minute bum numbing commuting on bicycles everyday. Nevertheless, it was a gorgeous goodwill gesture that did wonders for our isolated choreographer’s spirits.
Our reprieve from the confusion of riding bicycles on the right-hand side of the road, while attempting complicated hand signals and the nagging ringing of bicycle bells of irritated Danes was the South African Bar situated across the road from our theatre. The South African Bar was opened, just in time for the World Cup, by a Durban business man living in Copenhagen. It soon became our home away from home. We also found a small community of African and Coloured men, picked up in Cape Town and married to various Danish women. The South African bar had become familiar sanctuary from Danish Language classes and the many regulations of law abiding Scandinavia.
Of course every time we walked in after performing, much to our amusement and irritation, the barmen or DJ’s immediately played “Waka-Waka” by Shakira & Freshlyground, which was still topping the Danish pop charts in September.
We soon discovered that the Danes in Copenhagen only let their hair down only on Friday and Saturday night. The old Viking spirit returns as copious amounts of Carlsberg Lagers are drunk. Sightings of inebriated Danish men and women pissing in the cities many canals and doorways becomes “de rigueur” as is stepping into piss one enters or leaves an apartment building. The stealing of bicycles also becomes proficient. Two cast members suffered the experience of their “locked” bikes disappearing as I had an attempted robbery when I found that my bike had walked and parked itself across the road and around the corner.
My popular and admired, “FIK FUFA – FAK FIFU” T-shirt disappeared at Amigos Bathhouse and Spa one weekend, after a night enjoying cocktails, admiring and successfully chatting up the Israeli barman at Oscar’s Cocktail and Groove Bar, before hitting the dancefloor at the city’s largest gay club, BE PROUD.
Copenhagen is one of Europe’s Gay capitals boasting a very tolerant, gay and gay friendly establishments, restaurants and stores all over the city including one park that is kept open all night, for cruising, by order of the Mayor and Copenhagen City Council. Elements, a divine men’s clothing store in the Old City, gleefully took thousands of my Krone (1 Krone = R1, 20) as I spent on several discounted summer outfits, including a three piece suit, two pairs of Bjorn Borg underpants and a pair of suede & canvas Bobbi Burns high-tops which come with the tagline; “Oh how pretty…Ahhh get off me you spawn of Satan!”
On my last Saturday night I was invited by two mad Faghags to the birthday party of local Drag Queen diva, ………………………, in the autonomous suburb of Christiania. Christiania is a liberal almost hippy suburb famous for being the first place to allow pornography in Europe and is only second to Amsterdam as place to legally buy and use Marijuana, Hashish and other recreational narcotics. Needless to say the party was a debaucherous orgy of fun.
House of the Holy Afro owes its successful run in Copenhagen much to the loyal support of the city’s teenagers aged 16 -19. On our arrival, Brett Bailey the Director and I were invited to address 400 students from four different Arts Gymnasiums (High Schools) in the area. “ The Enfant Terrible of South African Theatre” Brett Bailey and his worthy sidekick Odidiva staged such a fascinating multimedia exhibition of South African style enthusiasm for House of the Holy Afro, that the students sold us out, 5 nights in a row. The shows became full blown concerts with girls screaming hysterically from beginning to end and resulting in one 19 year old boy snogging Odidiva in the middle of a performance.
I still receive Facebook messages from these kids who have found a new love for South Africa and its culture.
One of the results of performing in Cape Town and particularly at Beefcakes is that I have a large following of international students and tourists from all over the world. In March 2010 I had one particular group that came for 6 successive weeks to watch ODIDIVA LIVE @ Beefcakes. I got to know this crew of European boys and girls, quite well and one of them Julie is from Copenhagen. Julie invited us for a marvellous dinner at her apartment in the fashionable trendy district of Vesterbro, where after serving us traditional Danish Vrikkadels and glasses of divine German wine, the cast of House of the Holy Afro sang & danced South African traditional songs late into the night.
So emulating this gorgeous, cosmopolitan seaside Queer City, the Mother City, ODIDIVA is ready to open her arms, her soul and her voice and share her quirky witticism of local and international travel and other newsworthy quips with a receptively warm and summery Cape Town. See you there and remember,
“When I say Ho’, You say Bitch!” - “When I say Bitch, You Say Ho’”
I feel quite vindicated by my decision to quit performing at Beefcakes from July 2010 – November 2010. I love this Queer City, the Mother City, but she is as sweet in summer as she is bitter in winter.
The Mother City clearly suffers from a highly temperamental Multiple Personality Disorder. Like a well groom tart, the weather clears every Summer as she opens her legs to the international guests berthing momentarily at her various ports of call. In Autumn the South Easter picks up speed as her MPD borders on Schizophrenia. The temperature jumps from 30 degrees Celsius to 15 degrees and back again, every two hours as isolated scattered showers are observed in every Cape Town Suburb. By Winter her legs have decisively closed, as storms batter ships in Table Bay, with some even getting annually shipwrecked on the sandy banks of Sunset Beach and Bloubergstrand. Her PMS lasts for 6 day stretches as a thunderous dark cloud sits on Table Mountain and the city tolerates sustained, perpetually precipitous precipitation. This is the kind of continuous rain reminiscent of gloomy London and gothic Tokyo, in the classic Michael Douglas film, Black Rain.
As commuters rise to go to work and return home 9 hours later, in the dark, many wonder why we do not adopt Daylight Saving.
As the pendulum swings between 5 days of sunshine and 7 days of wet greyness, film and photographic shoots are either re-rescheduled continuously or cancelled completely. Event planners are suddenly thrown on to the proverbial roulette wheel, unable to predict or contain attendance as Capetonians become more fickle than normal.
The Gay Community becomes a Gay Village as the proverbial 10 degrees of separation becomes an incestuous 4 degrees of separation. Drag Queens turn on each other violently as social cliques tighten membership and withering looks, followed by insults are traded with astonishing regularity.
But the most outrageous farce of the Winter months is the news of restaurants in and around the city dropping like flies as they go belly up and close. Every year the hysteria reaches boiling point when the always untrue news of the demise of Blues restaurant at the The Bay Hotel starts doing the rounds. In 2009 14 restaurants closed in the Mother City. To this day the turnaround of new restaurants at the Harbour Edge building bordering the still unfinished Western Boulevard and Buitengracht Street, is astounding, at a rate of a new restaurant opening every 3months.
It is at this moment in Winter that the Old Money and the Nouveau Riche begin their shopping trips to London, Dubai and New York. Holidays are booked in the perennial favourites Mauritius, Bali, Mozambique and Thailand. The Yuppies attempt cosy getaways in the villages of the Boland, Overberg and the Cedarburg as families grab timeshare holidays in Durban, Ballito, and even Plettenburg Bay. The rest are forced to grin and bear it or go to the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown or the Knysna Oyster Festival with minus Zero degrees at night.
Johannesburg is not really an option except for the allure of sunny days sun tanning at poolsides of The Saxon, The Monarch, Westcliff, The Melrose Arch or Fire and Ice Hotels. Nights are spent cruising and partying at Gauteng superclubs; Babylon, Ramp Divas, Risqué, Lemon 8, Simply Blue and the new Discotec are like honey to a bee, for the Cape Town’s professional gay community. For the majority of this particular demographic, double income couples without kids, resulting in money for recreational use; the highlight of these escapades is Joburg Pride on the first weekend of October.
The official opening Spring Gay Day.
On my return to Cape Town, after attending Joburg Pride, I wrote the following update on Twitter,
‘Woke up with my eyes itchy and swollen, my nose sneezing, my throat scratchy, the weather has a multiple personality disorder and the World Cup stadium has already been written off, I am back in Cape Town.”
This year our Queer City managed to have a better winter than normal, thanks to that aforementioned World Cup and the Cape Town Stadium. Even British actors Alan Cummings and Ian McKellen and Academy Award winner Halle Berry worked in the city. The restaurant mortality rate improved. Event co-ordinators had more than their fill as even Justin Bieber came on holiday at the One & Only celebrity brothel.
Odidiva spent the entire World Cup 2010 headlining the international hit show, Directed by Brett Bailey, HOUSE OF THE HOLY AFRO at the Market Theatre. Attendance was fantastic with Marianne Fassler, HHP, Thandiswa Mazwai, Gloria Bosman and even Steve Hofmeyer coming along with hundreds of Mexicans, Argentineans, Dutch, and English and Ghanaian supporters. The reviews in all media were positively raving with the Mail & Guardian’s Arts Editor Matthew Krause writing,
“Odidiva climbs the stairway to heaven…for a few hours I thought I’d died and gone to heaven…The high priest of the holy house is drag diva Odidi Mfenyana, as the frontline performer “Odidiva” gets to change outfits for just about every number…Odidiva seems to be reaching spiritual catharsis…a disco party entering the risky area of African trance dance.”
House of the Holy Afro in its 6 years touring Europe and Australasia has only performed 3 times on the African continent. In 2007 at the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA), a significant middle finger to the oppressive and homophobic regime there. In 2008 we performed for one unforgettable night, at the OUT THE BOX festival in Cape Town. And then for the entire duration of the 2010 World Cup, House of the Holy Afro took over the legendary Market Theatre.
Opening night was the same day as the opening match between Mexico and South Africa. We woke up and went to sleep to the sound of the Vuvuzela. Traffic was gridlocked and noisy and colourful like a Mardi Gras. Every car displayed South African colours and white grannies had us in stitches attempting to blow Vuvuzelas. The energy was palpable and the spirit, simply sublimely rainbow nation ethereal.
We managed to fit in several promotional performances at Moyo in Melrose Arch where Face of Africa creator and South African fashion industry icon Jan Malan along with “it” fashion designer of the moment, David Tlale could not get enough of our outrageous showcases.
I remained in Jozi for a month after the World Cup to soak up the sun and the club scene, while getting to know South Africa’ Perez Hilton, entertainment and gossip blogger Mika Stefano . If you want to be at the forefront of what is happening in the world of entertainment or the gay community in Gauteng then Mika Stefano is your touchstone. It turns out that he is a huge fan of Odidiva and attended a couple of performances during my last Summer Season at Beefcakes before attending House of the Holy Afro at the Market Theatre. She thoroughly enjoyed the show but she still wanted to see more of ODIDIVA.
House of the Holy Afro then went on tour to Copenhagen, Denmark. In Copenhagen there are more bicycles than people. The only other country to have more bicycles per capita is the People’s Republic of China. Obviously, our mode of transport was cycling on bikes hired for us by our hosts, Republique Theatre, from a company called iBasekili, iBasekili?
I couldn’t help but notice that the spelling looked suspiciously like the Xhosa spelling of the word bicycle. On further investigation it was revealed that the company was part of a charitable service that sent all their old bicycles to the townships of the Eastern and Western Cape for school children to use.
House of the Holy Afro is a high energy song and dance extravaganza featuring traditional, gospel and Afro Pop put to house beats by DJ Dino Moran.
Our routine is such; the cast arrives 2hours before the show opens, to do a 60min physical warm-up; a combination of Pilates, yoga and contemporary dance under the enthusiastic athletic supervision of our choreographer Natalie Fischer. This is followed by a 30min voice warm up session and another 30minutes of soundcheck, make-up & costume mayhem before our diminutive, authoritative Stage/Tour Manager, speaking broken Xhosa slang, orders us up on stage as the curtains open.
The company is called Third World Bungfight, and the name fits this motley crew succinctly. It’s made up of township dwelling performers, a Jewish koegirl choreographer, our aforementioned Muslim Stage manager adhering to the strict spiritual annual fast of Ramadan, a flamboyant Drag Diva headed by the very Left of Centre Director, Brett Bailey.
This has continually been a recipe for a Third World Bunfight on every tour and at the most unexpected and inopportune occasions.
Thankfully, on this tour no company members were lost or left at connecting airports. But the choreographer fell terribly ill with pneumonia. She was booked into the local university hospital where they had under quarantine for 48 hours, due to her African status. Poor Natalie Fischer was relegated to a ward at the far end of the hospital. Her bed and most of the furniture was surrounded if not wrapped in plastic sheeting. Every visitor had to wear protective overalls gloves and accompanying face masks, like she could contaminate us with Bird Flu, Pig Flu and Ebola. It took 2hours cycling to find the hospital in the rain.
At this point cast members were gatvol with all the physical exertion between 90minutes hardcore performance, 60 minute body firming warm-ups and the 40 minute bum numbing commuting on bicycles everyday. Nevertheless, it was a gorgeous goodwill gesture that did wonders for our isolated choreographer’s spirits.
Our reprieve from the confusion of riding bicycles on the right-hand side of the road, while attempting complicated hand signals and the nagging ringing of bicycle bells of irritated Danes was the South African Bar situated across the road from our theatre. The South African Bar was opened, just in time for the World Cup, by a Durban business man living in Copenhagen. It soon became our home away from home. We also found a small community of African and Coloured men, picked up in Cape Town and married to various Danish women. The South African bar had become familiar sanctuary from Danish Language classes and the many regulations of law abiding Scandinavia.
Of course every time we walked in after performing, much to our amusement and irritation, the barmen or DJ’s immediately played “Waka-Waka” by Shakira & Freshlyground, which was still topping the Danish pop charts in September.
We soon discovered that the Danes in Copenhagen only let their hair down only on Friday and Saturday night. The old Viking spirit returns as copious amounts of Carlsberg Lagers are drunk. Sightings of inebriated Danish men and women pissing in the cities many canals and doorways becomes “de rigueur” as is stepping into piss one enters or leaves an apartment building. The stealing of bicycles also becomes proficient. Two cast members suffered the experience of their “locked” bikes disappearing as I had an attempted robbery when I found that my bike had walked and parked itself across the road and around the corner.
My popular and admired, “FIK FUFA – FAK FIFU” T-shirt disappeared at Amigos Bathhouse and Spa one weekend, after a night enjoying cocktails, admiring and successfully chatting up the Israeli barman at Oscar’s Cocktail and Groove Bar, before hitting the dancefloor at the city’s largest gay club, BE PROUD.
Copenhagen is one of Europe’s Gay capitals boasting a very tolerant, gay and gay friendly establishments, restaurants and stores all over the city including one park that is kept open all night, for cruising, by order of the Mayor and Copenhagen City Council. Elements, a divine men’s clothing store in the Old City, gleefully took thousands of my Krone (1 Krone = R1, 20) as I spent on several discounted summer outfits, including a three piece suit, two pairs of Bjorn Borg underpants and a pair of suede & canvas Bobbi Burns high-tops which come with the tagline; “Oh how pretty…Ahhh get off me you spawn of Satan!”
On my last Saturday night I was invited by two mad Faghags to the birthday party of local Drag Queen diva, ………………………, in the autonomous suburb of Christiania. Christiania is a liberal almost hippy suburb famous for being the first place to allow pornography in Europe and is only second to Amsterdam as place to legally buy and use Marijuana, Hashish and other recreational narcotics. Needless to say the party was a debaucherous orgy of fun.
House of the Holy Afro owes its successful run in Copenhagen much to the loyal support of the city’s teenagers aged 16 -19. On our arrival, Brett Bailey the Director and I were invited to address 400 students from four different Arts Gymnasiums (High Schools) in the area. “ The Enfant Terrible of South African Theatre” Brett Bailey and his worthy sidekick Odidiva staged such a fascinating multimedia exhibition of South African style enthusiasm for House of the Holy Afro, that the students sold us out, 5 nights in a row. The shows became full blown concerts with girls screaming hysterically from beginning to end and resulting in one 19 year old boy snogging Odidiva in the middle of a performance.
I still receive Facebook messages from these kids who have found a new love for South Africa and its culture.
One of the results of performing in Cape Town and particularly at Beefcakes is that I have a large following of international students and tourists from all over the world. In March 2010 I had one particular group that came for 6 successive weeks to watch ODIDIVA LIVE @ Beefcakes. I got to know this crew of European boys and girls, quite well and one of them Julie is from Copenhagen. Julie invited us for a marvellous dinner at her apartment in the fashionable trendy district of Vesterbro, where after serving us traditional Danish Vrikkadels and glasses of divine German wine, the cast of House of the Holy Afro sang & danced South African traditional songs late into the night.
So emulating this gorgeous, cosmopolitan seaside Queer City, the Mother City, ODIDIVA is ready to open her arms, her soul and her voice and share her quirky witticism of local and international travel and other newsworthy quips with a receptively warm and summery Cape Town. See you there and remember,
“When I say Ho’, You say Bitch!” - “When I say Bitch, You Say Ho’”
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