Culture : ‘Crossover’ is New Buzzword in South Africa : From music to theater to painting, the popular arts are becoming a chorus of diversity.

Some would call it a multicultural oddity: five Afrikaners, dressed in black and belting out the blues.

“I’ve got a wild-card honey. I said she’s one of a kind. Yeah, when the chips are down. . . . Well, you can call me any time,” crooned the thick-bearded bass player with a Texas twang who looked like a member of the rock band ZZ Top.

To his left, a long-haired piano player was sliding his fingers up and down the ivory and ebony keys. To his right, a whiz on a Fender Stratocaster was cranking out riffs, snarling now and then at the mesmerized mixed audience.

If it weren’t for the occasional South African lilt sneaking into a Muddy Waters or B.B. King tune, the Blues Brothers could have been a fixture in some bar in Mississippi. Butmore than ever before in their country’s history, artists such as these who cross cultural and national divides are gaining acceptance and popularity.

Fourteen months since its first democratic, multi-party elections, South Africa is showing signs of a multicultural crossover explosion in popular arts. For years, white regimes segregated the races and isolated cultures, but now the nation’s rainbow population--blacks, whites, mixed-race Coloreds and Indians--is beginning to savor its diverse heritage.

All of this is occurring against the backdrop of a relatively new openness in the country--from sexual attitudes to free markets. The liberated atmosphere is worrying those who want to preserve traditional values, and the local entertainment industry is wary of new competition from overseas.

Critics argue that any multicultural blending will remain predominantly a middle-class phenomenon. They warn that the nation’s impoverished black majority is likely be left out of the picture.

“We are talking about a country which does not have a single theater in the black townships,” South African director Duma Ndlovu, a black, wrote recently.

At the same time, many home-grown artists are just starting to come to terms with the new political changes. For years, repressive white rule provided an easy target for their creative arsenal. Now, with apartheid gone, some say that multicultural mixing could be the nation’s next galvanizing theme.

“Crossover is really beginning to happen. That is the one thing that is going to replace apartheid as the motor in terms of the new artistic wave in this country,” playwright Athol Fugard predicted. “It’s the rich, abrasive contact between different cultures rubbing up against each other that is going to spread all sorts of creative sparks.”

Nowhere in South Africa was this more apparent than at Grahamstown last week, when people of all ethnicities converged on this tiny town for South Africa’s largest cultural festival.

For most of its 25 years, the Grahamstown fest has been markedly Eurocentric, putting on Shakespearean dramas and Puccini operas attended predominantly by whites. At the same time, it was a forum for protest, particularly for white anti-apartheid writers such as Fugard.

“The new South Africa was seen in the festival long before it was seen anywhere else,” said Gillian Wylie, a longtime Grahamstown resident.

In the 1970s, blacks and other people of color had to get official permission to attend or participate in the festival. In the early 1980s, the white-run government, under heavy international pressure, loosened restrictive cultural laws in order to paint a better public picture of itself. For instance, blacks were allowed to act in plays with whites--and in any role. Resistance literature and plays enjoyed a renaissance.

Still, many prominent black anti-apartheid writers and artists refused to participate in Grahamstown and similar venues in order to observe a cultural boycott supported by the African National Congress, the resistance movement that now rules South Africa.

“The [ANC] movement felt that it was a place for the preservation of colonialist English culture. It was so geared toward Eurocentric works,” said John Kani, executive director of the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. It was not until 1990, the year apartheid began to be dismantled, that blacks like Kani started to showcase their artistic creations at Grahamstown. Today, the festival has a different flavor.

“It’s become increasingly South African and African,” said Richard Chernis, executive director of the Grahamstown Foundation, the festival’s co-organizer. “It’s a natural evolution as the rainbow nation becomes more and more involved in the arts.”

With resistance themes out of vogue, South Africa’s cultural intelligentsia is tackling issues ranging from environmental problems to sexual liberation.

For example, in one corner of Grahamstown a cabaret show--the main attraction a naked man running around the audience--makes a statement on sexual liberties. In the center of town, a band plays a mixture of Afrikaner Boer music and African mbaqanga tunes. They call it Boereqanga and bill it as “the music of national unity.”

“There is a degree of uncertainty as to what is our reality now. People are still feeling their way forward,” Fugard said. “But a lot of artists are now saying, ‘I can now write about something that has nothing to do with politics.’ ”

It’s Friday night at the Get Ahead Shebeen, located in the affluent Johannesburg neighborhood of Rosebank. The irony is in the name. A shebeen is a black township bar, and the club tries to bring a touch of Soweto into mostly white Rosebank.

Inside the crowded club, there’s some serious romantic posturing between several mixed-race couples on the dance floor. The band is playing traditional African beats in a Western pop style. The walls are plastered with ads for VIVO--a black-run beer company.

Across town, at an art gallery located inside the Market Theatre, another type of crossover is happening. Hiply dressed types sipping cocktails and beers scrutinize the artworks--corsets and bras made of dried meat. Some are talking about going to a “rave” later on, and they want to score some Ecstasy, the popular designer drug.

For many young South Africans, the United States is the cultural mecca. Radio stations here play Madonna more than any local artist. Rap has been popular with the Colored communities in the Cape since the mid-1980s.

The collapse of the widespread cultural boycott by international artists opposing apartheid opened a new, lucrative market for Hollywood and the recording industry. In recent months, the Rolling Stones and other older bands have played sold-out shows to the once culturally quarantined South Africans.

Most of the major record labels have opened up offices here. And Sony and MTV are expected to set up shop by the end of the year. Nowadays, Hollywood movies screen here a mere two to three weeks after opening in the United States. They used to arrive six months later.

In light of this overseas cultural invasion, local musicians and their agents are trying to protect their turf. The nation’s top stars are demanding a quota for home-grown music on radio stations, while South African media companies such as Gallo CNA are adding more local talent to their rosters to protect their foothold in that market.

It was some of these same recording artists who initially paved the way for cultural crossover. For years, local artists such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Johnny Clegg have blended Western and ethnic styles, playing to sold-out shows at the Market Theatre and other venues. Clegg, known as the “white Zulu” for his crossover music, is one of the most popular South African musicians abroad. Still, much of this cultural crossover has remained out of the masses’ reach.

The question on many minds is how to bring diverse cultures and art forms to the millions in the townships, most of whom can hardly afford the cost of a theater ticket. The answer for some: Take the arts to the townships. The Market Theatre, for example, conducts theater workshops and puts on Shakespearean plays inside township classrooms.

According to Fugard, Kani and others, the odds of a township writer or artist crossing over into the mainstream are quite good.

“You’ve got to recognize the huge, positive thing that has happened in this country,” Fugard said. “Today, the possibility of escaping the ghetto is very real, very tangible, very immediate. You can get out.”