When it first gets highlighted, the vampiric theme fills one with dismay, the suspicion that Kahn is self-indulgently overdoing it. Likewise the dialogue is delivered in a lacklustre, amateurish style, with lots of awkward asides to the audience. It creates a cheap, vaudevillean effect, the stuff of mass entertainment and low-budget marketing, which is so ubiquitous all over the world. The stage paintings pulled by the actors from the boxes to tell the story, are simulacra of some iconic works in the 20th century modernist canon, often scattered with glitter. She got a lot of help from the cast and from a dramaturge, Jaco van Schalkwyk.
Applying the skills obtained through her second degree, in visual arts, she made about 170 paintings (aided by Rebecca Haysom), directed the show and played several parts. Throwing all caution to the wind she upped the ante with the exotic theatre style she has been experimenting with in SA, the manishabai method from Japan which uses storyboard sketches drawn from boxes to tell a tale to street audiences. In interviews Kahn admitted her fears for the piece, after she had foregone the advice to use her stipend to produce something commercially viable. I loved it, and to the contrary, I believe it demonstrates precisely why sponsorships should come with maximum freedom and no strings attached. Should we be sponsoring such apparently irrelevant work? was the unasked question. Judging from comments after the well-attended show, theatregoers were intrigued, but many did not quite get it, and were left unmoved. I saw it some days ago at the Stellenbosch Woordfees, apparently an expanded version of the piece that debuted in Grahamstown in 2018. In her own words then, has she merely turned the Young Artist award from Standard Bank into a hollowed pit, in her rendition of the stories of two British artists, with reputations for being spoilt, selfish brats? Or as the PR material put it, is art more important than people? Is Jemma Kahn a vampire artist who sucks the little blood available in the anaemic necks of our arts patronage system to make works only she benefits from? Her latest, The Borrow Pit, alludes to the spot where soil and stones are excavated to be used on the adjacent construction site, to be left to the elements afterwards.
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