Staging Roberto Bonati’s The Blanket of the Dark: A Twenty-first Century Vision of ‘The Scottish Play’

The Department of Music at Rhodes University inaugurated the International Spring Music Festival in 2009. One of the central educational goals of this festival is to provide a platform for student performers to interact with local and international music professionals and to exchange knowaledge about performance practice through making music together. The shortage of informal venues for public performance and Grahamstown’s relative physical isolation from major centres are factors that tend to limit possibilities for students to perform in front of an audience, and the festival provided a number of opportunities for this. One of the special guests of this inaugural event was the Italian double bass player and composer Roberto Bonati, who directed an ensemble of students, lecturers and professional guest musicians in the South African première of his extended composition The Blanket of the Dark: A Study for Lady Macbeth. I first encountered Bonati through the offices of the Italian Institute of Culture in Pretoria, who facilitated the hosting of Bonati and his group (the RARA Quartet) for a workshop and performance at the Tshwane University of Technology. At the time, we expressed interest in a further visit by Bonati for the purpose of performing some of his music with a student ensemble. I was able to facilitate a visit by Bonati to Grahamstown in August 2009. The specific aims of this particular project were: