Johannesburg — GRAHAMSTOWN is fabulous at festival time. Suddenly this Eastern Cape backwater pulsates with life. The young in hoodies and beanies form long queues with earnest crones in hand-knitted jerseys to see every kind of live entertainment. For 10 days, audiences are cocooned in an imaginative world, where wilful escapism imagines a landscape beautiful and treacherous, where there is light and dark, humour and brutality. All forms of music, theatre, dance and art are available in an inexpensive programme full of choices.

For 33 years now, performers and producers with a love of the arts have been intent on creating at the festival a hotbed of culture: documents of sound, snapshots of the past, stories of long-forgotten lives and hidden tragedies, a tapestry of South African social history. The Inaugural Festival (as it was called) of 1974 set the parameters and peaks: to keep alive freedom of speech and artistic expression. Political and protest theatre played side by side with experimental music using every noise-making thing. Avant-garde art used found objects, movement extended the definition of dance to a frontier position. It was about antics and invention, eccentricity and living on the edge.

The sponsorships of Sharp Electronics, Five Roses and the Standard Bank allowed our artists to be amusing, vulnerable and fun. With high expectations and ready money, their directors and organising staff encouraged works of quality to be imported from overseas, scouring the world for ideas that were bold, fresh and new, or simply good. Because committees cannot always get it right, there were some duds along the way. Yet each successive year boasted one or two red-letter events and names with distinction and international clout.

But, where once the NATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL sought to reach beyond the shallow and meretricious and was committed to excellence, it has become proudly "all-inclusive" and "accessible". These are dangerous terms, especially when used around boardroom tables, for they pretend to be about one thing when they are really about something else entirely. They signal chips on the shoulder, which, though well-meaning, serve only to irritate. In the name of upliftment, they translate roughly into a lowering of standards to accommodate the previously disadvantaged in substandard work.

"Creativity," wrote Bob Dylan in his autobiography, "has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn't work." Instead of reaching for the stars, our artists are, all too often, projecting their own insecurities onto the world, obsessing about our local and ongoing issues which are surfeited with tragedy. The result feels aimless and self-satisfied.

The theme of this year's festival, from June 28 to July 7, is Pleasure with a Healing Purpose. Consider the programme a lucky dip and stick to the tried and tested. Go for glorious humour in Good Evening, the dramatised story of the Beyond The Fringe quartet, and the brilliant articulation of Fiona Ramsay and Sean Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? There is Tchaikovsky's classic The Nutcracker for ballet fans.

Do not miss the five Standard Bank Young Artists demonstrating their talents and proving just why it was they were given the opportunity to appear on the Mainstream stage. Soprano Bronwen Forbay is a soloist in Haydn's The Creation, and in concert under the baton of Richard Cock. Saxophonist Shannon Mowday appears in the jazz component, Akin Omotoso shows his award-winning films, Pieter Hugo concentrates his camera on Messina/Musina, and Acty Tang dances in Chaste.

The Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church Choir from Pennsylvania and the Yale Alumni Chorus compete with the University of Pretoria Chorale and Uhadi - Eastern Cape singers backed by traditional instruments - in towering waves of harmony. Look out for certainty in performance here and listen for the unusual and telling detail. Then book for The Story of the African Choir, a Market Theatre Laboratory production about the black church choir which set off from Kimberley to tour Britain in the early 1890s with disastrous results.

For all - and perhaps because of - its imperfections, our National Festival is surely unique. Perseverance pays and we do just keep on trying to get the right mix.