Forgotten history of EOAN opera group selected to compete for international award

A film inspired by a Stellenbosch University-driven project, to capture the forgotten history of the EOAN opera group, has been selected as the only documentary from Africa to compete for an international award at the International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA) in Amsterdam this year.

IDFA is one of the world's leading documentary film festivals and is dedicated to the exhibition and promotion of groundbreaking creative documentaries .

An Inconsolable Memory, produced by filmmaker Aryan Kaganof, will compete with a number of other international documentaries for the VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary. It will also be the first time that the documentary is screened internationally.

I am absolutely delighted to get the opportunity to showcase this documentary to an international audience, said Kaganof.

The filmmaker has also been chosen, along with two others from Africa to participate in the World Documentary Exchange (WDE). The WDE is a marketing programme that aims to support filmmakers in search for distribution channels for their film as well as deepen their knowledge of the documentary market . With this opportunity, the filmmaker will amongst others have the chance to engage with sales agents and TV buyers from the European markets.

The EOAN group was established in 1933 and functioned as a cultural organisation for so-called coloured persons from District Six. The organisation presented opera, drama and ballet productions and became particularly famous between the 1950's and 1970's for the opera shows it staged in South African and overseas. Today the group is based at the Joseph Stone Theatre in Athlone.

The EOAN group was South Africa's first grassroots opera company. It played a leading role in the development and performance of opera in South Africa and Cape Town in particular. The book about their history, Eoan - Our Story, is the first to tell the group's history, and this film not only complements the written history, but gives a unique perspective on the stories collected for the book, says Dr Hilde Roos and Mr Wayne Muller, co-editors of the book, which was released in January by Fourthwall Books.

The film presenter was Ms Ruth Fourie, the widow of Eoan baritone Lionel Fourie, and the production manager was Roos, a post-doctoral fellow from the Music Department at SU.

The University's connection to the Eoan group was established in 2008 when it took ownership of more than 105 document containers and 705 folders pertaining to Eoan via a permanent lending agreement reached by the Eoan Board and the institution. Ms Santie de Jongh, an archivist at the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS), was then tasked with sifting through the materials and establishing an Eoan Archive that is today housed in the DOMUS. Roos, who was still a PhD student focusing on opera history at that time, decided to create a chronological reconstruction of the history of the group in order to investigate whether it would be possible to compile a book.

About 45 interviews were conducted with Eoan members and families over a period of five years and transcribed.

A committee, which consisted of members from SU and Eoan, was responsible for working through all the information and providing guidance to arrive at the end product. The members were Roos, Muller, Fourie, De Jongh, Prof Stephanus Muller, a professor in the Music Department at SU and the head of the DOMUS; prof Christine Lucia, an eminent music scholar and Extraordinary Professor in music at SU; Mr Ronnie Samaai, the brother of the Eoan tenor Gerald Samaai; and Eoan bass Phillip Swales.

The EOAN project constitutes a first in South African music studies: the oral history methodology, the community-centred decision making that informs the book, the collaborative research and the creative reflection on that process through documentary film, said Muller.

The book itself is unique with chapters divided according to themes and the spoken language of respondents kept as is. It also touches on the often controversial history of the group which led to it making political compromises during the apartheid years in order to continue operating. These included separate performances for white and non-white audiences as well as the use of funds received from the Department of Coloured Affairs.

At the time that the book was released, Eoan opera singer, Martin Johnson (73) said: I am really excited that this book, which focuses on the Eoan group's history, is being published. I am over the moon to tell you the truth.

Most people do not realise the worth of works produced by great artists when the artists are still alive and often they have died poor as a result of this. We were the first opera group on the African continent. It's like I tell my grandchildren, one day you are going to hear about us, how we were the first opera singers on the African continent.

According to Kaganof, he let the filmed material from members like Johnson lead him in the final creation process.

The material that was collected during the filming of interviews with the elderly members of the Eoan group was what drove the direction of the documentary in the end. I wanted to tell the story of the Eoan group via the memories of the members that were shared with us on camera. However, as we know, memories are not always coherent, are often ambiguous, at times inconsequential, and contradictory. I tried to capture that feeling via the different types of film material I used (for instance cell phone footage), explained Kaganof.

The film also used the story of the Eoan group to try to understand what it means to be classified coloured, the compromises that people that were categorised in this way had to make to maintain their humanity during apartheid and in Eoan's case, the compromises that they had t

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