Perhaps the most inspiring work I saw at the festival this year was a programme of four short works by new young South African choreographers. The wrote the following article for Cue.
“How do we grow choreographers?” Jay Pather, National Arts Festival Committee member, asks rhetorically, “what we do is give them a space”. Fellow committee member Suzette le Sueur adds: “Fresh is a platform for choreographers that don’t have companies; there hasn’t been (one) on the festival for a while”.
According to Pather, the new discourses in South African dance “have paralleled and in some instances superseded…the theatre”. He ascribes this, possibly, to the fact that the body is a more universally readable, yet “richer source for indigenous ways of construing identities…I think dance tends to be edgier”.
Pather emphasises that Fresh is a process – the outcome of which nobody can predict. He believes the notion that there is some pre-existing ideal to aspire towards, has been a failing in some contemporary dance.
The concept is to remove dictates around theme, style and space, but “not to take away completely the notion of performance…because it is not performance art in the sense that it can’t happen on a road where there is no one watching, it’s not a happening.”
The initial curatorial vision was to perform the works concurrently in a cavernous space, taking the audience on a circuitous route, creating a sense that “these things are happening simultaneously in various parts of the country”. This was not possible due to the lack of a suitable venue, but they have hopes for next year.
Four works were chosen. Quicksand and (Bosol) Prison are conventional in their definition of a circumscribed performance space, while Silhouette and Plasticization are as Pather puts it on “the edges of visual art and the edges of dance…people like Steven Cohen have really pioneered that…I think that the visual arts world has taken note”.
Our dance scene has suffered from a tendency to promote good dancers into choreographic positions, when many are not up to it. Siyanda Duma is an exception – his choreography for Quicksand is as exciting as his dancing. He enters with a riveting set of rapid pantsula steps ending in high, wheeling kicks. Immediately one recognises the vigorous new energy our companies need. Stripping off eight conventional jackets and blazers, he reveals that like the rest of the dancers on stage, he is trussed up in a clinical white straightjacket.
Duma crafts fine moments as the performers play with concepts of physical equilibrium and mental balance. However, the ensemble work though passable was untidy; the music was pleasing but hackneyed – the Dead Can Dance sound has been done to death in contemporary dance, and Duma’s choreographic freshness was diminished by his musical choices.
Duma says the work should not be misread as depicting insanity, rather it is about the “the limitations we all have, and trying to redefine ourselves within those”.
The youngest of the four choreographers is self-taught Lucky Kele. For nine months he held dance classes for inmates at Boksburg Prison (‘Bosol’). Bosol (Prison) is based on “exploring how one can survive a prison space…how would one adapt to that life?”
Kele hails from Kathlehong with its strong pantsula tradition and it’s evident in his work. Few choreographers are capable of inventing new movement, but Kele demonstrates a knack for successfully trying new ways. It was most unfortunate that due to a ligament injury, Kele was unable to dance in his piece as planned.
In Bosol four dancers in Guantanamo orange uniforms stage fluidly choreographed fights, scenes of prison rape and victimisation, but with a delicacy that achieves greater impact than any Tarantino graphicness.
Kele uses the idea of a prison to ask the greater existential question about how we accommodate and find answers for the terrible and arbitrary things that happen to us in life.
Nelisiwe Xaba’s solo Plasticization also deals with restriction of freedom and movement. She enters wearing a mask and wrapped in a ‘China bag’, those blue, white and red chequered plastic bags that used to be made of woven material before they were ‘plasticized’.
Xaba says: “It’s about this love and hate relationship with plastic, how it protects us, but also how nature can’t take it, you need condoms but…”
It’s a delightful, witty solo piece, performed almost entirely from within the bag. Four ‘characters’ emerge, each represented only by a leg with a shoe: a ballerina, a gumboot dancer, a chorus girl, and a man (or a woman) doing pantsula.
About her work Xaba says, “I call what I do theatre-dance for now…I prefer to be directed by someone from a theatre background not dance…Warona Seane (director) comes from pure theatre”.
Mlu Zondi’s Silhouette premiered in Paris last year. It too is a theatrical piece, with text by Ntando Cele (of Tin Bucket Drum). He presents two grotesque, almost burlesque caricatures of stereotyped male and female identity. The male is lascivious, insatiable, and abusive. The female is spontaneous, organic – she farts and spits – but these are male prerogatives, and for violating them, she is inescapable typecast as slatternly and whorish.
Zondi says: “I like to find new ways of saying things…I did train in dance but I was in drama school, so there’s a lot of acting”.
During the performance, video artist Momelezi Ntshiba roams about the stage documenting what is happening with closed-circuit projections. Zondi is questioning the methodology of knowledge acquired through observation alone, asking the audience to question their own interpretation of the performance, arrived at from “a spectator point of view with no engagement”.
All four choreographers expressed their appreciation for the opportunity to showcase their work at the Festival.
Remix Dance
A healthy appreciation of the human body and its expression through movement should go far beyond the ‘perfect’ specimens normally associated with the dance world. The Remix Dance Company (founded in 2001) creates dance works by bringing “together people with different body histories, types and abilities”. Unlike the Paralympics, which is a competitive forum for people with comparable physical disability, Remix seeks to integrate ‘differently enabled’ bodies with ‘fully able-bodied’ dancers.
Sensitivities around the language reflect the prejudices that must be overcome. Dancer, Malcolm Black, says his not offended by the term ‘disabled’, but prefers ‘with disability’. Remix avoids work that elicits charity or provokes sympathy, but people still clapped during the show when he executed a difficult movement.
The Remix dance quartet is making its debut at the Festival, and it’s Black first time in Grahamstown. He’s a young man, with a handsome, strikingly symmetrical face. “It’s amazing to be in such a vibey place…where theatre is the number one thing!” Black lives with a neuromuscular disease called Fredericks Ataxia. Though not paraparetic, he is wheelchair dependent.
Black’s motto is “any body [that’s two words] can dance.”
The other members of the quartet include Andile Vellem, who is deaf, and two strong, ‘non-disabled’ dancers, Nicola Visser and the Mpotseng Shuping. Visser is an exceptionally graceful and expressive danseuse.
To Pieces is a double bill. I can’t give you anything but love is based on the Billy Holliday song of the same title and choreographed by Ina Wichterich. When first performed a year ago, Visser e-mailed me excitedly: “I feel that we have created something very true, very funny, very disquieting, very beautiful.”
The piece opens with Vellem signing the first line of the song to the audience.
The dancers work less as a quartet, and more often as four solo performers, each using a different language: sign language, Xhosa, English and Afrikaans. Visser says: “Love is so simple, in essence, but it gets messed up when you start trying to talk about it”.
It’s a playful, slightly mischievous piece – deconstructing the ‘fourth wall’ when Black takes a cellphone call in the middle of the performance. Its challenging work on several levels and requires the audience to hand themselves over to the experience. Visser says some audiences are “discomfited” by it.
The uniqueness of the bodies requires that choreographers be invited to create specific works for Remix. It’s an advantageous way of working even for regular companies as all bodies have their limitations.
Second Time Broken is choreographed by Adam Benjamin of the UK, a pioneer in this field of dance. It uses fragile, white porcelain pots in a progression of sizes, which when suspended near to each other in the dancers’ hands, appear as segments of a single large vessel. Visser says the pots “have a story in them… I want you to hold one of these pots, to know”.
The original musical score by Neo Muyanga includes the sound of shattering ceramics. Black interprets: “To find the whole, things must first break, before…you find wholeness again”.
Both works have memorable moments of intense beauty and pain, but lack continuity. The exposed wings of the Centenary Hall exaggerate these periods of stasis.
Speaking of the venue, Black remarks on the difficulties facing the performers in simply getting between the toilets backstage and the performance space. “Please also mention,” he asks, “that the Village Green doesn’t have a single toilet for wheelchairs, even though portable loos for this purpose are available and easily set up.”
