Ma Wa Gray

I spend every working day teaching young adults about the dramatic arts.  My job is to try and explain something that is sacred, a ritual as old as human consciousness.  The art of creating and appreciating theatre is a deeply personal one. What moves me to my core may not necessarily do the same for someone else. What I may consider cliched and hackneyed may be ground breaking for someone else.  I have three degrees in Drama. I have watched countless plays in theatres all over the world. As a teacher I am both a compassionate audience member while at the same time an astute one. I can see when someone has tried hard to try and create something meaningful on stage but I am also seldom moved to my core by something.  There have, in fact, only been three times in my theatre going history where a production has come to an end and I have found myself truly rising from my feet in joy not to give a standing ovation but because what I have experienced has made me feel like ...

I’m sitting in my car. I’ve parked in my drive way and both my children are fast asleep. I wonder how much time of my life has been parked in my car while one of my small people sleeps. I would imagine that it is quite a lot.  Gray has collapsed against the strap of his safety belt. His mouth is wide open and little curls of hair frame his face. On his lap is a giant rubber dinosaur, its expansive brontosaurus head tucked under his arm. His long black eye lashes splay out against the porcelain skin that he has inherited from me. His complexion has as yet to receive the inheritance of it’s African home but I have no doubt that the freckles will come.  Eva’s little head droops forward. Her dummy trembles every now and then and her feet bounce occasionally to the song on the radio. It is almost as if she is dancing in her dreams. Her beloved muslin ‘lala’ sits cradled in her lap. A little stubbed toe catches my attention. We will no doubt be needing to find a plaster for it as so...

Music is a very important part of my life. I think it is for most people. And to be honest I battle to associate with people who don't somehow rely on music the get them through their day. I've just popped in to chat to our Director of Music this morning. He is preparing our boys to sing at a memorial service this afternoon. A well known figure in our school community passed away over the weekend due to COVID and his family have requested two of his favourite songs to be sung. I listened to the boys rehearsing one of them - Queen's 'Who Wants To Live Forever'. On discovering that this was one of the requested songs I literally had to hold in a massive 'tjank' of sadness in. I did not even know this man but I know this song and I can only imagine how it is going to make everyone feel when they hear it during the service. I realise many of my blogs have somehow touched on death recently and I really didn't want to be morose today. I suppose its just such a...

So I’m eight days in. I feel like a Comrades runner who has just run the first 100 meters of the marathon and it suddenly dawns on me what I have just got myself into. To be honest I feel like that when I go for my run in the evening. It is only 4km but those first few meters of running are totally jarring and actually quite painful.  Because running was never high on my list of things to do it doesn’t come naturally to me. Stephen, bless him, has great faith in my innate athletic ability and sometimes it is just his belief in me that gets me going.  I think with most things it’s the starting of them that can be the most overwhelming. At the end of last year when I was staring down the barrel of the 10kgs I needed to lose (because the baby weight excuse wasn’t quite cutting it at my ‘baby’s’ second birthday) it was quite a daunting prospect. Rewiring ones brain and committing to a plan of action that will result in a great deal of change is never easy. But it is often very nec...

This is going to be a short blog today. But its message is a simple one and it came from a chat I had today in my classroom... It came about during a grade 10 lesson. We are studying the old Greek fart nugget 'Oedipus Rex'. I find students really get into a play when you preface it by telling them it is a play about a guy who kills his dad and marries his mom. The play is about the power of prophesy and its ability to change the shape of the future.  At some point in the teaching of this play we hit the inevitable debate about prophesy. And it is a very grey area. People prophesy in Christianity. Sometimes they get it wrong. And our fallen world is full of voices, powerful ones, that seek to make us live in the tomorrow rather than live by the grace we have been promised for today.  I am hugely aware that we exist in a world where we have to be sensitive to the multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-gendered choices... so many multis...of those around us. But that shouldn't...

Step 1: Allow the gentle notes of the soundtrack to 'A River Runs Through It' to play in your head in order  to drown out the jarring noise of your 4x4 going where no vehicle has gone before. Step 2: Find yourselves on the edge of the precipice no where near a river. Step 3: Check hand drawn map sent to you via Whats App. Try several times to align the screen to being able to actually decipher the trail you were supposed to take.  Step 4: Discover that you accidentally veered off on a hiking trail and not the promised 4x4 trail. Congratulate husband on turning a track into a road. Step 5: Retrace steps. This will take some time because the way back up a hiking trail in a large Pajero is not as easy as the way down was. Step 6: Find the right road. Take it. Step 7: Weave your way gently down a very sedate '4x4' track. A Sunday drive really compared to where you've just been.  Step 8: Arrive at the side of a rapidly running river.  Step 9: Allow husband to do all the ...

It is strange how things link together. Ying and yang if you must. This blog is the antithesis of yesterday’s one   Last night Stephen and I had a rare night away from our children. At about sunset, as we were sitting down to our beautiful meal (not cooked by me) I got a sudden hit of unbearable homesickness. A feeling I haven’t felt since I left school. That feeling that slips under your skin as the world starts to darken. A feeling that tells you that you are not where you are meant to be.  I had to phone my mom immediately to check on my children. They were gloriously fine. They always are when they’re with their grandparents. But I wasn’t.  About an hour later my high school WhatsApp group exploded with the news that a very dear friend of mine passed away unexpectedly due to a brain aneurysm. She leaves behind a two year old daughter and a husband.  And then I realised where the source of my homesickness was coming from.  Claire. The friend who I shared my f...

Something happens to my mom when she steps onto the sand of Umzumbe beach. It happens at a cellular level. It’s like jump starting a car. She slowly starts rolling and the moment her body hits the sea water she springs back to life. It is almost as if every part of her gets rebooted and renewed and balanced in that baptism of water. I watch as her body shoots out from under that first wave. Her arms reach upward, her fists clenched, every muscle pulsing, her joy complete. And then she will look back onto the beach to find one of our faces and share a knowing exclamation - her ritual is complete. It is one of my favourite things to watch. And the intensity of the moment is even more so if she has endured a long separation from the ocean, specially if it has been due to some kind of illness. I think my mom measures her recoveries with the final moment of healing - when she is strong enough to face the waves. When she can wash the final notes of weakness off into the swirling biome of wat...

A few days ago I managed to tick something off my bucket list. I went onto Tinder.  It’s not as suspicious as it sounds though. A good friend has plucked up the courage to put herself out there and so she and another (morally solid) friend and I got ourselves some gin and judged people by their profile pictures. Another very excellent filter when judging a person on Tinder is their use of grammar and punctuation. And whether they describe themselves as ‘paleosexual’. Yes guys. That’s an actual word. We had to Google it. It basically means you’re attracted to clever people. Quite frankly I’ve always enjoyed a doff person who can’t spell the word ‘mountain’.  Let me tell you it’s a quagmire out there. And the range of profile pictures - from unflattering profile shots of many chins to sun tanned strips of old biltong standing next to Lamborghinis (which probably aren’t theirs)- pickings were pretty slim.  And then there are the little paragraphs some people use to describe ...

This morning I woke up to the news of the Matric IEB results. It was an excellent morning. My subject, Drama, achieved an average of 80%. As a school five of our matric subjects achieved an average over 80%. The results are exceptional.  It’s a very strange experience looking down a list of names and marks at the end of a year like last year. That singular mark will never encapsulate everything that was sacrificed, laboured over and fought for. It will never show the hours of sweat drenching masks as we tried to create practical examination pieces that respected social distance but still allowed our students to shine. It will never show the boy who worked his entire life to make first team rugby having to pack his boots away after just one game. It will never show the cancelled flights to the World Choir Games. It will never show a group of eighteen year old boys having to put their dreams aside for the greater good of society.  In the end that mark is just a number. And the o...

When teachers who work in the field of the Arts have to seek feedback on a particular work of art from their students  - be it a painting, piece of music, a dance, a dramatic performance etc - they often have to start with a precursor. And the precursor is this - ‘This wasn’t made to be understood. This wasn’t devised so that we can put it in a box fully dissected and labelled. It was created to be felt, to be experienced, to make you part of something. And sometimes you won’t be able to find the right words to explain how it makes you feel because the feelings are so intense and sometimes confusing.’  I remember a distinct moment last year when I was trying to teach my matric boys the incredibly post modern play, ‘Ubu and the Truth Commission’ from the depths of my bedroom via a Microsoft Teams meeting. Eva was crying at the door telling me she had had a poo and my matrics where almost crying online because they couldn’t understand the play. What a time to be alive. If you ha...

So about a year ago I decided to give up scrolling through Facebook. I was still going to use it to share my blog, check birthdays (so very crap with birthdays) and make sure I wasn't tagged in any dodgy photos that involved me with a double chin. And it worked very well for a couple of months until we all got locked down and social media became the only way for us to connect with loved ones who we would have ordinarily seen in the flesh - that and I suddenly had a whole day to kill with two small children and very little adult stimulation. I think for many of us social media was a saving grace, a way to not feel alone, a way to swop sour dough bread recipes and complain about home schooling.  But I'm back to what I absolutely love doing. I'm being creative. I have students in my classroom. My children are both at school. And (as my dear friend Greg Banach would say) "Its the year of the body". No more sour dough. I've lost 7kgs and I'm getting my s%#t tog...