The Values of Diversity

Spier Estate, a short way from the southernmost tip of Africa, is redolent with history. For two thousand years in the seasonal grazing lands of Khoe sheep herders, it was among the first areas colonized by the Dutch East India Company in the mid seventeenth century. The land was first allocated, in 1683, to Arnoud Janssen, and later named for the German town of Speyer. In the middle years of the eighteenth century, the manor house was adorned with elaborate plasterwork and gables characteristic of the slave estates of the Cape countryside, and a fusion of European Baroque and the Indonesian traditions of the skilled slave artisans who built this and similar houses in the winelands of the Western Cape. In recent years, Spier has become justly famous for its open-air theatre and its summer festival of music, theatre and opera. Today, the slave-master’s house is an elegant restaurant and the slave bell is a feature in a lush garden heavy with summer pollen, and the ghosts of three centuries of contested history are somewhere in the thatched roofs, outbuildings and flowerbeds. In January 2002, the Spier Festival offered an open-air production of Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas to enchanted audiences. Purcell wrote Dido and Aeneas in 1689 at the same time that Arnoud Janssen was turning his first fields at the opposite end of the world. The Spier production showcased the work and talent of the University of Cape Town’s School of Opera in a fusion of early modern and Western concepts of witchcraft, magic and courtly love with African rhythms and traditions of oral poetry and music. Avoiding the assumption of primordialisms that beset so many attempts to weave African strands into the cosmopolitan cultural forms of our contemporary culture, Angelo Gobbato’s Dido and Aeneas used the juxtaposition of Purcell’s music and Baroque ensemble with African instruments, voices and dance to mirror each back to the other, lifting out opera’s theme of love and betrayal. In interpreting an early English opera in this way, the production reclaimed its authenticity, as it was common seventeenth-century practice to include contemporary dance and musical interludes.