Blessings and kombucha — why Rob van Vuuren is everyone’s National Arts Festival Bae

He played Van in the 2017 movie Van der Merwe. And last year he starred in the stage adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel, The Promise. His versatility as a performer is immense, yet to most South Africans Rob van Vuuren is best known as a stand-up comedian and for creating cartoonish characters such as one half of the deranged duo, Corné and Twakkie, and his whacky alternative guru social media sensation, Namaste Bae. 

Whether you know him from TV or movies, from the stage or from your Instagram feed, the plucky (and these days frequently half-naked) actor-comedian says he owes his career to the National Arts Festival. It was there, he says, that he was awakened to the very possibility of being a performer. 

Attending the festival as a schoolboy made him realise that his creative instincts could in fact become the single-minded focus of a professional career. 

“I’m kind of intimately tied into the festival,” he says. “It’s an intrinsic part of how I view myself as an artist.” 

He was in high school, when his mother, who’d gone to the festival, called him to tell him about what she’d seen, and about the musicians she’d heard live. As she fed him a “hint of what this ‘arts festival’ thing was all about”, he was in awe.

The following year, still a schoolboy, he went with his mother. “It fundamentally changed my life,” he says. “I felt like I’d found my tribe. It made sense. I fitted in.”

He says the festival was where he first saw many of the artists who became his heroes and mentors. “As a kid I saw such incredible things. From Johannes Kerkorrel performing songs from his Bloudruk album to seeing Theatre for Africa and all those Raiders shows. And watching Andrew Buckland perform for the first time… All of it was mind-blowing for me.”

Buckland, who created some of the best physical theatre to have come out of South Africa, was for many years a lecturer at Rhodes University’s Drama Department, where Van Vuuren went to pursue his hope of becoming an actor. 

At drama school there were more pivotal moments, including a failed audition for the student festival production in his second year. “It was being directed by Andrew Buckland and I put all my effort into it and I was like, ‘This is it! I’m gonna get into this play!’”

But he did not. 

“I completely screwed up my audition. I didn’t get the part. In fact, my good friend got the part. My other friend, Bevan Cullinan, also auditioned and also didn’t get the part. So Bevan and I decided, ‘Let’s just write our own play for the festival. Why should we wait to be cast in the department’s production?’”

Which they did. 

“We wrote a play called Squadron Marmite, which was this kind of existential, absurdist, physical comedy, clowning show which Andrew Buckland helped us out with. We put our show on under our own steam, knowing absolutely nothing and with just one year’s drama department training behind us.”

Van Vuuren says it was the second time the festival changed his life.

“It made me realise that you can actually kind of put the power in your own hands. You can take control and you can also make the kind of stuff you want to be in. So, in a way, that helped set my career in motion.”

In all his glory, and now with extra yoga-powered stark-raving lunacy, Rob van Vuuren as Namaste Bae, in Makhanda this month for the National Arts Festival (Photo: Nardus Engelbrecht)