Ballerina and choreographer Kitty Phetla sits in front of a group of dancers rhythmically tapping away on the floor as they delicately bend and stretch.
“Hold your stomachs in tightly ... one, two, three ... lift higher people, stretch slowly — this is ballet people, not karate,” she calls as her pupils follow her instruction.
Phetla, who was the first ballerina of African descent to perform Anna Pavlova’s famous solo The Dying Swan in Russia, is a teacher at the National School of the Arts in Braamfontein.
It’s one of only three special focus schools in the country where learners specialise in art, drama, music or dance as part of their normal school day. It’s been around for over 50 years and has produced some of the country’s top art names — Hollywood actress Charlize Theron, violinist Samson Diamond, singer Bianca le Grange and Bhungane Mehlomakhulu from Ballet Black in the UK ranking among them.
But the school has run into financial trouble and so far this month has been able to pay teachers only 70% of their salaries.
“It’s a crisis. We are struggling and doing our best to get by,” explained Brenda Sakellarides, art director and fundraiser for the school.
“We are a specialist school where children have to pass auditions to get in, and are also required to have a decent academic record. It’s probably the only place where you will see kids having to pull off pointe shoes and then run to a physics class,” she said.
The reasons the school is now in such dire financial straits are numerous and real. One being that only 43% of the school’s 515 learners pay fees. And while they do their best to supply the children with the musical instruments, art supplies and whatever they need for their particular art form, it’s not always possible.
School principal Salome Gaelesiwe and acting deputy Nellie Reddy sat huddled together over mounting bills.
“Look at this lights and water bill for July. It’s R425,000,” Gaelesiwe told TimesLIVE Premium on a recent visit to the school.
“It’s impossible. We already have a query lodged, so we cannot even question this until it has been paid,” she said, describing their ongoing battles with the City of Joburg.
“The schools nearby have been kind enough to share their bills with us, and we have seen that even though they have sports facilities and swimming pools while we don’t have anything like that, their charges are significantly lower than ours. It just doesn’t make sense,” said Sakellarides.
“This school attracts extraordinary children, but not all of them come from means and we have learnt that you cannot judge a book by its cover. How can you expect a child to buy pointe shoes for R1,200 when their breadwinner is on a Sassa grant?”
Sakellarides said the school had numerous donors, many of them supplying bursaries, and the Gauteng department of education had also been responsive.
“This is an election year, and like everywhere budgets have been tight. But we are battling to keep our heads above water. We need to increase the parents paying fees to 60% and ideally get in R7m to take us through to the end of the year,” Sakellarides said, explaining that while the complete closure of the school was unlikely, the next step would be to retrench teachers.
“Hopefully we will avert the crisis and everybody will be fully paid come August 1. We cannot dismiss the value of a good, public-funded arts school.”
Mother Tania Steenkamp, a member of the school governing body, has been trying to help solve the financial crisis. Her son Callum, 16, is a transgender student in his second year at the school and is majoring in drama, intent on becoming an actor.
“We put Callum in a private school in Linden when he started high school. But he was really miserable there, battled to be himself and came to me with a slide show presentation explaining why he wanted to go to the National School of the Arts. And that was actually the first time I even heard of its existence,” Steenkamp said.
So she sat down with her husband Willem and they agreed to allow Callum to audition for the school.
“We told him that going to an arts school would mean doing drama and then also keeping up his academics. And unless he could manage to keep his marks in the 70s, he would have to go back to normal school,” she said.
“He just flew. He is so happy and settled. He has made great friends and his marks have all gone up dramatically.”
Actor, director, playwright, influential drama lecturer and theatre administrator Malcolm Purkey is devastated by the trouble the school is in and believes there is no way it should ever be allowed to close.
“It’s a desperate shame for the whole city and a shocking tragedy for the arts. The school has a fantastic track record and has produced record numbers of artists across the board,” said Purkey, who has been involved with the school and worked on several “I Love Jozi” productions at the school.
“I am a patron of the place and believe it’s time to come up with emergency funding and review our attitudes to arts funding. We are deeply disrespectful of our arts and culture in this country. In America you get children learning to play an instrument from age five and that is why you find their people so deeply engaged in music. Here we have produced some of the greatest artists in the world and yet we don’t know how to support them.”
Art therapist Kate Shand is deeply concerned about the possibility of the school losing some of its school governing board posts.
“My daughter is a drama teacher at the school and I support one of the learners, so I can't claim to be unbiased. But it really is an important school that supports and nurtures enormous creativity and without it some of those children would be forced to go to schools with no arts at all,” she said.
“We live in a traumatised society and I believe the arts help us be more responsive, empathetic and resilient. It's not just an endeavour, it's emotional and social wellbeing. People should be throwing money at it because it showcases the best of what Joburg is and has to offer and a form of collective healing.”
National Arts Council (NAC) spokesperson Sibonelo Chauke said while the council agreed that there was a need for specialist arts schools, they did not fund them and would get involved only in specific art-related projects that meet NAC funding guidelines and criteria, and that the education department was best placed to comment.
Efforts to get comment from the department of education were unsuccessful.
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