Hip Happening: New tricks on an old wave

A child skateboards around an illuminated bed. A photographer sits cross-legged on the floor, oblivious to the beer-swigging students and suburban dads who saunter from artwork to artwork around him.

There are blonde dreadlocks and sculpted afros, beanie-clad heads and balding pates, all bopping to a ukelele.

The music thumps through you as you stand in the crimson glow of the stage lights. Sketchers sketch, mimes mime, everything happens at once. This is Red Eye Durban, the city's most happening Friday night gig.

It's all as creative entrepreneur Suzy Bell intended when she decided to revive the experimental arts concept she created in 1998. The original model was conceived to attract a wider and more culturally diverse audience in the post-apartheid South Africa, she said.

"I was working as an arts editor when I met former Durban Art Gallery director Carol Brown at the gallery's art exhibition openings," said Bell. "It was always a very old crowd and very white. I was surprised that there was no young-arts scene."

Asked by Brown to come up with ideas to attract a younger and more colourful crowd, Bell developed an arts model ''in which all art that was culturally diverse, engaging, fresh, experimental and contemporary could be housed under one roof for one night to maximise the audience and create an energy and buzz around art and artists in Durban".

The original Red Eye Durban ended in 2010 but now the pop-up event is being resuscitated.

Said Bell: ''What I like about Durban is its potent creative energy, its diversity. It's a truly African city.

'Red Eye Durban has an animator from Egypt exhibiting, a fashion show from Kinshasa, kwaito artists from Ntuzuma and graffiti artists from Sydenham."

Each Red Eye event features a different lineup of artists from a wide variety of creative mediums, be it performance and visual arts, music, fashion, photography, dance, comedy or film.

Mind Coast ISA is one of the bands that performed at the first revived Red Eye Durban event.

Said band member Ricardo Biahute Estrada: ''We do hip-hop, R&B and Afropop. We come from Equatorial Guinea and we perform in Spanish, English and French, which is something you don't usually find in Durban. It has been received very well because we don't concentrate on stereotypical hip-hop. We've performed mostly on the underground scene. We had a mix-tape, which we sold out of at the last Red Eye Durban event."

• The next Red Eye Durban features live gaming and animation, in addition to visual arts and performance. It takes place on Friday from 6pm at Emoyeni House, 25 Haraldene Road, Glenwood. Tickets are R100; R50 for students, at the door