Lara Foot, speaker (Session 1 | The Art of Business) at the New York 2014 ISPA Congress, January 14-16, 2014, Imagining a New Economy for the Arts. View the full Schedule of Events. Lara Foot | Speaker Baxter Theatre Center CEO and Artistic Director
Lara Foot is CEO and Artistic Director of the Baxter
Theatre Centre and has won a bevy of South African theatre accolades. She has
put most of her energy into helping other playwrights and theatre-makers
realise their work and she has nurtured several dozen new South African plays
to their first staging. This includes producing the international hit Mies Julie written and directed by Yael
Farber. Since heading up the Baxter Theatre Centre she has
transformed the theatre’s development programme - the Zabalaza Theatre Festival
- to become recognised and respected as one of the most vital and important
platforms of its kind in South Africa. As a former Rolex protégé to Sir Peter
Hall, she hosted a unique cultural gathering at the Baxter with Mentors William
Kentridge, Wole Soyinka and Peter Sellars alongside seven protégés. As a writer and director, her own hard-hitting playstackle social issues and have laid bare the brutality and sickening
frequency of child rape in South Africa; Tshepang
(2002) was based on a real event, the alleged gang rape of a nine-month-old
baby by six men in a remote, impoverished community. Foot used refined, ironic
humour to sketch a portrait of the community, and then turned everyday objects
into symbols with horrific poetic effect. Karoo
Moose (2007) returned to the subject of child rape and a rural town - a
shattered, forsaken community where ‘there are no fathers’. A 15-year-old girl
is sold for sex to pay off the gambling debts of her jobless and spiritually
crushed father, ‘an opportunist with no opportunities’. In Solomon and Marion, Foot explores the cruelty of the meaningless
murders which betray her country. Solomon
and Marion, Hear and Now, Karoo Moose and Tshepang are published by Oberon Books.
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