City Soirée is promoting the arts

Unconventional performances in unconventional places

"I realised that various artists, whether it’s poetry or music, who all work either in other fields, have 'real jobs', or like me teach five times a week, never get time to practice or perform anything, " says Gerhard Maree. "You write a little piece, but never perform to anybody because there is no opportunity. So what do you do with it?" And his idea was born for the City Soirée, happening at least once a month in Cape Town.

A soirée is an evening party or gathering, typically in a private house, for conversation or music.

In a time where Cape Town is trying to re-invent the city, it’s the right time for City Soirée. The idea: an evening with three different high quality performances, 20 to 30 minutes each for a small audience each time in a different venue. City Soirée in one sentence? "Unconventional performances in unconventional places, and it’s always good," says Gerhard.

"There is incredible talent in Cape Town," Gerhard continues while also talking about his vision to make art sustainable. While City Soirée is still a very intimate and almost underground thing, it already has a loyal crowd of followers. "There is always a bit of poetry but mainly music; classical music, pop music, rock music, everyone who learnt something and wants to play it, dancing, theatre, a short film, also things that are trying to push the boundaries. Basically everything, there is no genre." Gerhard wants to give artists the opportunity to perform and offer Capetonians fresh, high quality and cutting edge performances. Gerhard started approaching people, for instance UCT professors asking about students that should get a chance to perform.

"Part of the strategy was: if you take three different art forms or three quite different performances, even if it’s all music and bring them together on an evening, you are almost certain to have a crowd there. You might have 20 people that come for the poetry, then you get 20 people that come to the classical guitar performance and 20 people for the short film. 60 people, that’s a crowd."

It all started like this: "So I told my friends, how about we get together once a month and we eat way too much and drink way too much and perform whatever we want. I decided to tell them we’ll call it a 'soirée', because I like the idea how they did a soirée a 100 years ago. It was all very high society which we are obviously not, but I like the idea of a lot of creativity between friends. We started doing this in May 2010 once a month in private homes and then Creative Week Cape Town came up and I thought: we have to do something and decided to take it more public." The first three evenings of City Soirée were held at the Wessel Snyman Gallery, other venues were the Book Lounge, the Haas Collective, the Unitarian church – to introduce people to new places and try to move away from traditional venues.

"Performers at the last concert were Loftus Marais, who is a fantastic Afrikaans poet, Dillion Banda, the Zimbabwean who plays traditional Shona music on his umbrera and Vera Vukovic playing the lute and Yuri Kuprashow playing double bass. All of this threaded together."

'For free' spreads quickly

So far, a City Soirée evening is free. It’s a celebration for the sake of art. "Part of the philosophy of what I’m doing is to get the art away from being a charity. City Soiree is just one leg of quite a few things we’re interested in branching out to making the art sustainable and experimenting. Ideally, it will fund itself," says Gerhard. His other idea is to have a business that makes money and funds the City Soirée nights.

For now, City Soirée will stay in the City Bowl, "But," says Gerhard, "I want to get to the point where I flood Cape Town with these events." People give phenomenal feedback and already enquire about events on the West Coast, Melkbos Strand, the Northern Suburbs and Stellenbosch.

text by Antonia Heil | photographs by Malherbe Pelser


Gerhard Maree, a classic musician (focus is on classic guitar) is in his late twenties and moved from Pretoria to Cape Town in early 2007. At the moment he teaches music, composes scores for films and his big baby is the organisation of City Soirée, his long-term project together with visual designer Charl Cater.

City Soirée
Gerhard Maree | Cape Town | citysoireeinfo@gmail.com | www.facebook.com/CitySoiree

PS: Bring a blanket to a City Soirée night and leave it there for charity; the organisers will pass it on to people in need.

Check in our events section for the next City Soirée event as well as other happenings in and around Cape Town. Enjoy!

Subscribe to our newsletter and connect with us on Facebook and Twitter.