Maitisong lustre lost to days of yore
Nnasaretha Kgamanyane | Thursday April 13, 2017 18:00
The festival is one of the biggest calendar events, which attracts performers from outside the country, but this year the festival was not impressive.
The festival this time around had a lot of hiccups, namely poor attendance, poor coordination, and absence of high profile acts and cancellation of various productions.
Performers and production directors also expressed disappointment.
This is one of the local shows that have been attracting a very large crowd of people from different social backgrounds, different age groups and races. In the previous years, Maitisong had an attractive lineup of different arts and culture categories from choral, drama, opera, dance, choirs, hip-hop, gospel, paintings, fashion shows where upcoming artists had an opportunity to sell their products to the nation at large.
The Maitisong Festival was created to give the public an opportunity to be inspired by the best of the arts scene. Many groups came together and performed at the festival. Back then, music, dance and drama burst onto the stage like never before in Gaborone attracting a number of revellers in this alcohol-free entertainment session. Normally, this show would take longer. It would run for two weeks or more with an enticing lineup.
However, this year’s show proved to be a great disappointment. Arts & Culture has observed that the show did not attract as many audiences as it used to.
“Marketing started late, it’s not like people knew that the festival was on, the management was under pressure,” Moratiwa Molema, a creative director who had a production that showcased during the festival, said.
It has come to Arts & Culture’s attention that the festival encouraged artists to market their own productions despite them being part of Maititsong Festival.
A South African stage play titled Sobukwe My Husband literally had four people as part of the audience. A number of shows such as Moratiwa the Musical, The Harvest and Marangrang were pulled out of the festival without any solid reason being given to the audience.
Lack of coordination made it worse for the festival with events such as the poetry slam starting one-hour-30-minutes late because there was no sound system set and no audience at the venue. Participating poets were only told three hours before the show that they will be contesting.
“I was told at around 3pm that I will be participating at the slam at six in the evening after I had even given up, thinking that I did not manage to qualify,” a poet that wished to remain anonymous said.
Even when performers pulled out of some performances, Maitisong Festival management failed to communicate with either the audience or performers. Notably rapper Nomadic was supposed to perform last Saturday during the Words Acoustic Café. There was no formal communication from the management to the audience of the show’s cancellation.
“The festival faced a number of challenges, which was not good. I am aware that they are going through challenges with funds, but I feel like the marketing was not up to par this time around, which led to a low audience quality. That Maitisong Festival vibe was not there this year,” performance consultant, Tefo Paya said.
This year’s Maitisong Festival did not live up to standards it always had. The hype that it has always carried in the previous years was nowhere to be found, it is slowly losing its grip and significance.
Everything was just different this time around from low attendance and the poor standards of production of the whole festival, which were easily noticeable.
Most afternoon shows that were held during the week saw mainly students attending.
Paya noted that with the low attendantce artists felt demoralised despite staging high quality productions.
However, Paya noted that it is also up to the artists to make the festival gain its momentum by going on the ground and marketing their own shows and events to pull in the numbers.
“My main problem with this year’s festival is that I was not given enough time for technical rehearsal because of the regulations within the Maitisong Theatre. I am a multi-media artist. I personally think that its time we had a national theatre for performance and not use Maitisong Theatre, which is a school hall,” Molema said.
The scheduling of the festival was not so friendly and the majority of the productions were theater based, which made it look like a theatre festival yet was an all-round festival.
“I wouldn’t judge them, but I feel like the festival was dominated by drama productions yet there is a variety of disciplines such as dance. I think they should start commissioning productions before they go on stage so that they can select quality productions. Next year they should up their standards. We have a lot of quality to make the production more fruitful,” a contemporary dancer said.
In this day and age of internet and social media it is not much of a challenge to market a festival, especially with boosting posts so that they reach a wider audience.
Maitisong director, Gao Lemmenyane was not able to comment regarding this year’s standards. He kept saying he was in a meeting when called, until his phone was offline.