I've had a soft spot for the Performance Space for many years, though I haven't been back since they moved to the Eveleigh rail yards under the Carriageworks moniker. Last thing I saw from them was a sprawling production of The Wages of Spin at their old Cleveland St premises. Well, today was the day.
Wade Marynowsky's The Hosts is an installation of several tall, orotund and frankly Dalek-ish robots in a fairly large, partially-lit, hermetically-sealed space. Being the early afternoon, I was the only one there, which added to the general spookiness and claustrophobic ambience. I got the impression that the robots were probably sound activated, or at least there was some way to interact with them, but I didn't figure out how. I expected some diversity amongst them, something closer to the kinetic sculptures at the MIT Museum, something less uncanny. Perhaps I should chase up the reference to Masahiro Mori, The Uncanny Valley (1970).
At the apparently unbranded last-cinema-standing on the venerable George St strip, whose box office area now looks like the guts of an old Grace Bros store. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing with Jacob after a fine meal at the incredibly popular Mamak.
In many ways this is precisely the movie one might expect to emerge from modern South Africa, a coarse tale leavened with many sharp insights told with unflinching firmness. Issues of race and origins are never far from the surface, nor is the possibility of transmogrification. The plot was a bit holey but my brain didn't object too strenuously.