Cape Town Opera

With the Government’s declining to increase the total amount of funding available for the performing arts and assigning the entire budget for this funding to a body known as the National Arts Council while permitting any and all performing groups to apply for a tranche of the funding, it hardly came as a surprise that Cape Town opera was at first refused any form of funding from this national source. Even now, after many applications and evidence of job creation for underprivileged communities, Cape Town Opera receives an amount of less than 5% of its total annual budget from national sources.

Obtaining funding from private and business sources proved and continues to prove extremely difficult, since the South African government provides no tax incentive for arts donations. Cape Town Opera was, however, fortunate in obtaining some additional financial support from the Regional Government of the Western Cape, as well as establishing a fruitful working relation with Artscape, the re-named subsidized company that operates the CT Operahouse, now known as the Artscape Operahouse.

The production of Porgy and Bess that is currently playing in Berlin has been conceived not only to reflect the particular intensity and energy of our South African singers, for whom the daily reality of their lives and simply going back home after a night’s work are more dangerous and more fraught with melodrama than any of the operas in which they perform, but also to set the action in the period of Apartheid’s highest arrogance and worst excesses, with forced removals and demolitions of ancestral dwellings competing with natural disasters to make life all too expendable and all too miserable for the many so conveniently forgotten by the few who live in comfort and security.

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