The Cape Performing Arts Board (CAPAB) was a South African theatre organisation based in Cape Town, serving the former Cape Province. It was one of the four state-funded performing arts councils in the four former provinces of South Africa instituted in 1963.
In 1961, the National Theatre Organisation was disbanded and replaced by four provincial performing arts councils. In Cape Town, the Cape Performing Arts Board (CAPAB) was instituted in 1962 with the aim to promote the performing arts in the Cape Province and South Africa. The arts councils received sufficient government subsidies to fund various art forms as well as the operational requirements of the theatre facilities. [1] Staff could be taken into permanent employment.
CAPAB opened the Nico Malan Theatre Centre on 19 May 1971, [2] to be programmed and managed as a production house with four arts companies – orchestra, opera, ballet and drama. In line with the new South African the political dispensation and the concurrent changes, the complex was renamed the Artscape Theatre Centre in March 2001.
Since 1994, government policy changed dramatically. All performing arts boards were transformed to managers of playhouses and the various arts companies had to become independent. [1] The CAPAB Drama Department staged its last production in May 1997 with a final performance of David Mowat's The Guise, a play which has the survival of the theatre as its theme. [3]
The new organisation, Artscape, was launched on 27 March 1999 to replace CAPAB and the Nico Malan Theatre Complex was renamed the Artscape Theatre Centre.
Artscape Theatre Centre is the main performing arts centre in Cape Town, South Africa. It was opened in 1971 and is located on reclaimed land in the Foreshore area. The inaugural performance was scheduled to be Giuseppe Verdi's Aida but illness struck the title-role singer Emma Renzi and the production was replaced by CAPAB Ballet's Sylvia. Other productions in the opening season were Mozart's Die Zauberflöte in Afrikaans and Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly. The complex includes:
The Baxter Theatre Centre is a performing arts complex in Rondebosch, a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. The Baxter, as it is often known, is part of the University of Cape Town; it is also the second largest performing arts complex in Cape Town, after the Artscape Theatre Centre.
Pieter Toerien is a South African producer and theatre manager, responsible for bringing many large scale musicals to South African stages, including Cats, Disney's Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Phantom of the Opera, as well as a number of original and play productions, often collaborating with others in the field.
Phyllis Spira was a South African ballet dancer who began her career with the Royal Ballet in England. Upon returning to South Africa, she spent twenty-eight years as prima ballerina of CAPAB Ballet, a professional company in Cape Town named for the Cape Performing Arts Board. In 1984 she was named the first South African Prima Ballerina Assoluta.
The Cape Town City Ballet Company, formerly known as the CAPAB Ballet Company, is a dance company based in Cape Town, South Africa.
David Poole was a South African ballet dancer, choreographer, teacher, and company director. During his thirty-year association with dance companies in Cape Town, he had "a profound effect on ballet in South Africa. He is internationally recognised as a significant figure in the world of dance.
Cape Town Opera (CTO) is a professional opera company in Cape Town, South Africa. CTO was founded in 1999 by the management and staff of the former South Africa Arts Council Opera and the Cape Performing Arts Board (CAPAB), itself a successor to the Cape Province Performing Arts Council and the previous Opera School at the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town, which had been founded in the early 1920s under the Italian tenor Giuseppe Paganelli.
Ashraf Johaardien is a multi-award-winning playwright, actor, and producer. He was the recipient of the inaugural PANSA Jury Award (2002), was listed as one of Mail & Guardian's 'Top 200 Young South Africans' (2008) and he received a Legends Award (2012) for his achievements in arts and culture.
The Maynardville Open-Air Theater is an outdoor theatre in Maynardville Park, Wynberg, Cape Town, South Africa. It seats 720 people and is known for its annual Shakespeare in the Park plays.
Johannes Nicholas Malan, better known as Nico Malan, was an attorney, politician and administrator of the Province of the Cape of Good Hope of South Africa from 1960 to 1970. He was born on 8 August 1903 in Fort Beaufort and died there in 1981. In 1968 he received the Freedom of the City of Kimberley.
The Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra (CPO) is an orchestra based in Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa.
Peter Alan Krummeck was a South African actor, theatre designer, director, writer, teacher, and activist, who won renown beyond South Africa in his one-man play Bonhoeffer. Pioneering the use of drama as a tool for reconciliation, he founded the African Community Theatre Service with Archbishop Desmond Tutu as patron.
Frank Staff was a South African ballet dancer, choreographer, producer, and company director. He was a major figure in the history of European theatrical dance in South Africa.
Amy Jephta is a South African playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. Works include Kristalvlakte, Ellen: The Ellen Pakkies Story, Other People's Lives, Sonskyn Beperk, and While You Weren't Looking. She is a lecturer at the University of Cape Town and the first recipient of the Emerging Theatre Director's Bursary in South Africa. Her work has been staged at The Fugard Theatre, The Bush Theatre, The Royal Court Theatre, Jermyn Street Theatre, Theatre503 and the Edinburgh International Festival. Jephta is an alumnus of the Lincoln Center Theatre Directors Lab and was one of the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans in 2013. Her monologue Shoes was performed by James McAvoy and directed by Danny Boyle as part of the 2015 show The Children's Monologues at The Royal Court Theatre. She has been a storyliner and scriptwriter on the drama series, Nkululeko, a coming-of-age story set in Khayelitsha for South Africa's Mzansi Magic Channel. Amy also lends her writing expertise to Cape Town-based soap opera, Suidooster, as a story-liner and scriptwriter.
The Alhambra Bioscope, also known as the Alhambra Theatre, was a theatre that opened on Riebeek Street, Cape Town, South Africa in 1929.
Brian Astbury was a South African photographer, theatre director, acting and writing teacher, and founder of The Space Theatre in Cape Town, South Africa.
Kirvan Fortuin was a Khoikhoi First nation dancer, choreographer and LGBT activist, the child of Ms Charlotte Fortuin, a Khoikhoi community stripped of language, land and culture and who were erased as a people post-democracy South Africa
Marita Napier was a South African operatic soprano, known internationally as a performer of music by Strauss and Wagner. She performed in 19 productions of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. In 1989, a recording of Wagner's Die Walküre with her in a Metropolitan Opera production was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. Napier was considered one of the best Turandot, having performed the role for over 70 times including 1989 production by Franco Zeffirelli at the Met.
André Roothman, also known as Andre Roddtman, is a South African actor and teacher. In a career spanning more than four decades, Roothman had made several notable roles in theatre, cinema and television. He is best known for the roles in the films; Consequence, Charlie Jade, Cape Town as well as Arende franchise and soap operas 7de Laan and Arendsvlei.
David Bloomberg was a former Mayor of Cape Town, lawyer, anti-apartheid campaigner, theatre columnist, theatre director and author.
