John Nankin

(19**-) Designer, actor, stage manager, director. * John Nankin joined The Space Theatre in 1973 as a stage designer and set builder directing plays in the venue’s fringe under the mentorship of Brian Astbury. In the late 1970s, he participated in experimental performance workshops with Charles Unwin Chas Unwin, Jacqui Singer, Marcel van Heerden, Barney Simon and others; before co-initiating the avant-garde and now historic Glass Theatre with Chris Pretorius in Cape Town in 1981, a group whose ground-breaking work was informed by a return to Surrealism and Dada. Mama Papa Kaka was made in collaboration with Ivor Powell in 1983. It was part of the first program shown by Possession, a Johannesburg-based artists’ collective, associated with performance and installation. In 2012, Nankin grafted a new work onto this relic from his ‘childhood’, Nankin has , A leg to stand on, where an aged man is blessed with a preternatural growth – a huge leg, but only one, the other remains ordinary.

His work for The Space in the 1970s, iclude designs for Don't Drink the Water, Edith Piaf – Je Vous Aime, Endgame, The Exception and the Rule, The First South African, 'The Glass Menagerie, Lesson in Blood and Roses, Luv, Medea, My Husbands wild desires almost drove me mad, Outcry, Patty Hearst, Play it again, Sam; Sticks and Bones, Superman and Treats. Acted in Don't Drink the Water, Picnic on the Battlefield, Tsafendas and What the Butler Saw, directed The Space: Four Twins, In Two Minds, Patty Hearst and Sticks and Bones, and was stage manager for The Exception and the Rule.

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