The Dog Days are Over and Another Great Year For Fishing are to be staged at the National Arts Festival.

Two celebrated Flemish productions will have their African premiere at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. This showcase of Flemish culture and talent is brought to South African audiences thanks to the Government of Flanders and the Flemish-Dutch House deBuren.

“We are proud to bring two incredibly talented artists to South Africa’s premier celebration of creative and artistic talent,” says Dr Geraldine Reymenants, General Representative of the Government of Flanders in South Africa.

Acclaimed choreographer Jan Martens is bringing his production The Dog Days are Over to the festival and producer Tom Struyf will be staging Another Great Year for Fishing.

Jan Martens, born in Belgium in 1984, studied at the Fontys dance academy in Tilburg (Netherlands) and graduated at the Artesis Conservatory for Dance in Antwerp (Belgium) in 2006. In 2009 he began developing his own choreographic works and quickly received critical and popular acclaim. The high energy dance productions grew in popularity and were initially performed mainly in the Netherlands and Belgium before spreading quickly around Europe.

He debuted formally as a choreographer in 2010 with the highly praised i can ride a horse whilst juggling so marry me, a work focusing on a group of women living in a world dominated by social networks.

In 2011 he created two ‘love duets’, both investigating the clichéd portrayal of a male-female relationship: a small guide on how to treat your lifetime companion and sweat baby sweat. The first one was selected for Aerowaves, a European network supporting young choreographers. The work has been performed more than 80 times

The Dog Days Are Over, to be performed at the National Arts Festival on 9 and 10 July, centres on the idea that when a person is asked to jump, they lose focus on the façade they project and the real person behind the mask is exposed.

In the performance Martens forces his audience to reflect on contemporary dance, culture policy, the difference between art and entertainment, as well as why they would want to witness an intensity that is not revealed in daily life.

“The show attempts to put its audience in a trance, yet simultaneously create the aesthetic distance necessary to question why they are in the theatre right at that moment,” says Martens.

All Martens’ works explore the possibility of a perfect balance and symbiosis between story-telling and conceptualism. He does not try to create a new movement language, but instead moulds and recycles existing idioms and places them in a different setting, so a new idea emerges. He maintains that, in his work, the beauty of the incomplete human being is revealed over complex choreography or physical virtuosity.

Tom Struyf was born in 1983, and graduated in 2007 as an actor at the Maastricht Theatre Academy (Netherlands).

His work has won him acclaim and seen him perform at many of the great theatres in Belgium and the Netherlands. His performances The Tatiana Aarons Experience and Act to forget were selected by the jury of the Flemish-Dutch Theatre Festival for Circuit X.

Another Great Year for Fishing, staged at the National Arts Festival on 11 and 12 July, is a performance about the power of stories and images, mass communication and indoctrination. “It’s a play about the question of how to lead a normal life in an ever-changing society and thus constantly requiring a great deal of adoption power. But the show must go on,” says Struyf.

During the show Struyf and dancer Nelle Hens are looking for the fire exit. With the help of a wide range of spin doctors, psychiatrists, journalists, and philosophers they try to unravel what happens in the backrooms of the rat race.

Both Jan Martens and Tom Struyf have recently been acknowledged for their major contribution to the arts. On 2 July, Martens will be awarded the 2015 Charlotte Köhler Prize – a prize that aims to encourage and develop young talent – by the Netherlands’ Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds. In May, Stuyf’s Another Great Year for Fishing was also selected for the Berlin 2015 Theatertreffen Stückemarkt – a festival of discovery for young European theatre makers who develop a new theatrical language.

“We are delighted to bring something new to festival goers, and we invite them to explore all forms of art while they are at the festival, such as this mini-Flemish season when it debuts in Africa,” says Ismail Mahomed, Artistic Director of the National Arts Festival. “We are really very proud to bring this standard of performing arts to South Africa.”

Flanders is the Dutch-speaking autonomous region in the north of Belgium, with Brussels as it is capital. The General Representation of the Government of Flanders in Southern Africa is committed to showcasing the diversity and innovative creativity of Flemish arts and culture.

View video clips of the productions here: www.tomstruyf.be and www.janmartens.com