Friends unite at Afrikaans arts festival
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While part of the magic is the spectacular setting - the blue-skied town of Oudtshoorn located in the Klein Karoo between the Swartberg and Outeniqua mountains - a drawing card is the camaraderie amongst the technical team who work under the helm of Pieter Jan-Kapp. The festival is also a welcome injection to the economy of Oudtshoorn, the ostrich capital of the world and home to the Cango Caves.
This year’s festival took place at the start of April with Blond Productions once again appointed as the main technical supplier for most of the theatre venues, Multi-Media taking care of the main theatre (The Burgersentrum), and Nation Events & Projects, a local rental company, assisting with some of the smaller venues. Heuer Pianos supplied the pianos and tuning services, Split was responsible for the production decor transport and MERL Structures did all the staging and seating stands.
There were at least five MA Lighting consoles on the festival ranging from a grandMA full size to a grandMA2 light, and Jaques Pretorius from DWR Distribution, MA Lighting’s South African distributor, was on site during set-up to provide technical assistance.
Pieter Jan-Kapp, better known as Kappie, has worked on KKNK since the festival started in 1995 - for the first 12 years as lighting technical support and for the past 15 years as the technical manager. He remembers those early years and the pure size of the festival. “During the first five years, KKNK was the only Afrikaans arts festival and had over 35 venues! There was nowhere to park in town,” he says.
With Covid-19 stealing two years from the festival and fewer freelancers available as a whole due to the pandemic, the 2023 KKNK team worked extra hard to pull off high-quality shows whilst overcoming loadshedding, the widespread national blackouts of electricity experienced in the country. “The greatest challenge we faced was the shortage of crew, specifically theatre-trained crew,” Kappie shares.
Riaan Rademan from Blond, who has been part of KKNK since 2005 with 17 festivals under his belt, oversaw the technical planning. “It’s always special to be able to meet up annually with a lot of the ‘old hands’ from all over the country to become part of the KKNK family,” Riaan comments. “It’s like going ‘back to our roots’, creating theatre venues out of school halls and other spaces, and is a place where many of us started our journey in the industry. It also gives me great pleasure to be able to pass on my knowledge to some of the younger techs, fresh to the industry. I also want to thank DWR for always assisting us in any way possible to make the festival a success.”
Lighting operator, Edwin Böhmer from Multi-Media was stationed in The Burgersentrum, the main theatre at KKNK. Edwin affirms. “It was a great experience to see people gathering at the Burgersentrum, coming back to see productions again.”
