Rene Juta
Rene Juta (18**-) was an author and playwright.
(Her name on occasion found as René Juta)
Contents
Biography
Born in Cape Town, daughter of Sir Henry Juta and sister of South African born artist and authorJan Juta (1895-1990).
Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance
1890s: In one of the early amateur productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream in South Africa, she and Rudyard Kipling, along with her other sisters and family servants, entertained Cecil John Rhodes by performing scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream on the slopes of Devil's Peak in the 1890s.
In 1909, inspired by the grand preparations in Cape Town for a national pageant intended to inaugurate the newly-forged Union of South Africa in 1910, she composed an outdoor pageant, the Masque of the Silver Trees; a neo-classical quasi-Jacobean performance.
Sources
Peter Merrington, State of the Union: The "New Pageantry" and the Performance of Identity in North America and South Africa, 1908-1910, Journal of Literary Studies 15, nos. 1-2 (1999): 238-63.
Jan Juta. 1972. Background in Sunshine: Memories of South Africa. New York: Charles Scribner‟s Sons: p.52.
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