Standard Bank Young Artist Gavin Krastin presents multipronged, interdisciplinary work at this years’ National Arts Festival edition

By CityLife Arts Writer

Every year one of the interesting features of the National Arts Festival is the Standard Bank Young Artist’s (SYA)  work during the festival, and this year is no different.

In fact Gavin Krastin’s work as SBYA is really interesting. It’s called 12 Labours and is a reflection on who we define as a hero in today’s world. In this case Krastin has chosen to reflect on acts of service in the community as the ultimate heroism and will be presenting clean-ups and fix-ups with a performance art spin

This Performance Art titled 12 Labours is a multipronged, interdisciplinary performance project, comprised of 12  individual performative acts and public community interventions, occurring across  Makhanda, from April to July 2022. The project reimagines the toxicity of conventional  understandings of ‘heroism’ and ‘masculinity’ through the localising, adapting and queering  of the classic Greek tale of “The Twelve Labours of Hercules”. Instead of a single hero’s  journey of slaying, capturing, and stealing, 12 Labours features a group of queer artists come-garden-gnomes, in collaboration with local artisans, civil servants, gardeners and  contractors, who collectively perform a series of actions centred around notions of repair,  community building, gratitude and transgressive joy. 

Occurring over several months and in a range of locations, the twelve labours are presented  simultaneously in a single space, throughout the festival, where audiences can move through a multisensory journey of audio and visual documentations and the exhibited  detritus of those labours that have already occurred, alongside the live performance of  several labours by the artists (during the walkabout). 

“There was a time when we needed heroes, but they eventually ridded the world of its  magic, and so I propose a lawn of garden gnomes instead. A collective of ordinary queer  people who approach acts of service as a kind of love language in an arguably corrupt  capitalist economy. And in so doing, we also hope to position performance art, as it is  traditional understood, as necessary labour and infrastructure for the public good – because  we need performance art as much as we need roads, green spaces and walkways.” – Gavin  Krastin 

Production details

Conceived and curated by Gavin Krastin 

Dramaturgy by Alan Parker 

Videography and photography by Evaan Jason Ferreira 

Research Assistance by Julia de Rosenwerth 

Collaborators: Students of RU Drama Department, Makhanda-based artists, artisans, civil  servants, contractors and gardeners.

Production Management by Matt Short

Biography  

Gavin Krastin is an artist, curator and educator working predominantly in live art  performance. He holds a Master of Arts Degree in choreography and performance, from  Rhodes University Department of Drama, and is immersed in the professional performance  art scene in South Africa and abroad. From 2013 he lectured (part-time) at UCT’s Centre for  Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies, but in 2018 he joined his alma mater, Rhodes  University (or the University Currently Known as Rhodes), as a fulltime lecturer. 

Gavin’s interests lay in the body’s representation in alternative and layered spaces. His  practice straddles theatre, dance, visual arts and curatorship, resulting in artworks that are  often full of beauty, but not always easy to stomach. The queering of space intrigues him  and inspires a questioning of behaviours and transgressions in his work.

Rather than using  performance to escape the politics and mess of the body, he uses his body to occupy and  subvert aspects of presentation and representation. In 2018 he founded and launched the  Live Art Arcade, an annual and nomadic experimental platform for live art and performance  by young multidisciplinary artists.  

Permeating multiple spaces, Gavin nurtures and inspires an inventive and imaginative ethos  in the realisation of artistic production, education and curation in the performance industry  and our communities. His work has been shown across South Africa and in the USA, Canada,  

England, Wales, Scotland, Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, Brazil and  Switzerland.