Staging a Comeback
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A direct descendant of Andries Pretorius, who led the Boers to victory in the Blood River Battle, Chris Pretorius earned a degree in visual arts at the Cape Town Art Institute and found work as a designer in the opera and the theater. “I enjoyed manipulating images on the stage,” he explains. During the 80s he established himself as one of South Africa’s leading avant-garde directors, staging about two plays a year, many of them at the prestigious Market Theatre in Johannesburg. But some of his works were controversial: Sunrise City, about the apartheid government’s plan to build casinos in the black homelands, was banned after its opening. Pretorius appealed the decision and won, but he’d grown weary of tangling with the authorities. In 1990 he and his wife at the time, choreographer Robin Orlin, applied for scholarships to study overseas; Pretorius won a theater scholarship in Milan, but the couple moved to Chicago after Orlin was invited to study performance art at the School of the Art Institute. Says Pretorius, “I had heard there was an exciting theater scene here.”
The success of his firm has enabled Pretorius to restart his theater career. Several months ago he decided to write something about South Africa and called Lynette Marais, director of the National Arts Festival, to propose a play. “I was sort of making up what I intended to do as I was speaking to her,” he says. But Marais accepted his proposal, and according to Pretorius his homecoming has become big news in South Africa. Working on the third floor of a loft building in Bucktown, he constructed the scenery for Dark Continent and rehearsed the play with South African actor Neels Coetzee. After the premiere, Dark Continent will be staged in Leipzig and possibly Berlin.
The board of directors for the Chicago Dance Coalition has hired Matthew Brockmeier of the Chicago Music Alliance to manage the CDC for at least the next six months; he’ll oversee programming and administration while working with the board to develop a new long-term strategy. The board has been trying to decide how the CDC should function ever since executive director Gerard Seguin resigned in February, citing a lack of commitment from the board and the dance community at large. Some board members agree with Seguin that the coalition should be dissolved to allow for a new grassroots organization to emerge, while others think it should simply hire an executive director who can provide more leadership; according to Brockmeier, all options are still on the table.
