Videos
The collection of videos included here have been produced by Marie Minnaar from footage and recordings complied over the course of November and December 2024, with additional camera work by Luke van Rensburg.
I feel blessed and grateful for how they have captured atmosphere and nuance so sensitively in key moments during the completion of My Listening Heart.
‘5 Parts’ provides a visual overview of what is contained in these memoirs and how the different parts and components of My Listening Heart site are curated.
‘The Conversation’ with Dr Dawn Garisch filmed in Kalk Bay on Saturday 23rd November is a rich contribution to these memoirs. Dawn’s questions provide a focused framework allowing me to reflect on and consider more deeply this multi-faceted creation which has manifested as My Listening Heart. Her role has been pivotal from the initial impulse and instruction to start writing, through facilitating the memoir support group and subsequent inclusion of the first episode ‘Girl Child’ in the collection “This is how it is” published in 2018 through the Life Righting Collective which Dawn founded, and then more recently her listening to the four parts of my memoir recorded as audios.
During the afternoon of Sunday 15th December 2024, Marie filmed and produced four music videos which reflect my ‘musical language’. I am very grateful for these musical memoirs, as they showcase my beloved 1901 Bechstein piano beautifully.
This piano, played by my grandmother, my mother and me over more than 8 decades, has crossed the Atlantic three times and most recently survived a flood when a surge of river water and mud entered my home in Stanford in September 2023 and stood for 5 hours with the water level just under the key board. Restored after the pedal board collapsed, she sounds quite remarkable in her twilight years at age 124.
The three short videos on ‘Kalk Bay’ provide glimpses into events described in some of the episodes. ‘Norman Road’ is where in 2003 I was recovering from surgery when the music came through spontaneously on my Grandmother’s piano (Part 2, Episode 3); ‘Rough Encounter’ brings back memory of an event in 2013 which left me in a wheelchair; and ‘Windsor Road’ revisits the cottage where I started writing these memoirs while confined to a wheelchair. (Part 4, Episode 6)