Visitors to this year’s National Arts Festival are planning their schedules around Standard Bank Young Artist for Dance Mlu Zondi’s latest piece of choreography. Titled Cinema, the piece is presented as an installation for four performers and film projection. Zondi is the darling of the festival not only because his experimental choreography is on the pulse of contemporary interdisciplinary performance but also because his personal story has gripped the hearts of his audiences.
Zondi was born in Durban and grew up as an orphan. A pantsula dancer in his youth, he yearned to be a professional performer, but after completing matric further studies were unaffordable. He worked as a petrol attendant for three years, banking his earnings, and eventually enrolled at the Durban University of Technology for a diploma in performance. It was a residency in Switzerland in 2002 that brought with it the opportunity to perform at the Lausanne International Dance Festival and inaugurated his professional dance career. Despite a series of interesting collaborations with visual artists and performers since then, his work has been somewhat under-recognised in South Africa — until now.
Cinema is a work enabled by the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, and Zondi has used this opportunity to devise a production that might have struggled to find a home under other circumstances. The work is far stranger, for instance, than previous winner Dada Masilo’s take on Bizet’s Carmen, which was a hit at last year’s festival. Instead of sitting in raked seats around a sprung-floor stage, audience members are free to navigate a hall with its parquet floor covered in bubble wrap. This makes for a noisy introduction to the show, but it also betrays the movements of fidgety viewers during this long and sometimes demanding performance.
Within the open space, four performance stations are demarcated. One, a passage that runs lengthways across the hall, is occupied by Zondi, who stands bound at the wrists and ankles with LED light ropes.
Other spaces are occupied by almost mythical renditions of South African characters: a township Lolita (a prostitute perhaps) who does the popular kwasa-kwasa nightclub dance, a young man with a knobkierie who enacts traditions of black masculinity in South Africa, and a mournful bag lady.
Four film projections are arranged above these performance stations. They give us clues about the deeper meaning behind Cinema. Playing above the bound Zondi is a close-up of his own face, eyes alert and looking around the room. The film invites us to follow his gaze and scrutinise each performer, but it is also a reminder of the audience’s own implication in the performance. As much as we are watching this performance, it is watching us.
The bubble wrap keeps a record of the tides of audience interest in each station. When the audience is bored with a performance station, the crackling sound swells on one side of the room and is quiet on another. Each performer acknowledges the presence of audience attention in some way, and Tulisile Khumalo, who plays the Lolita, does an especially engaging job of this. Singling out individual onlookers, she coos and preens, improvises singular snippets of choreography, forcing viewers to follow through with the voyeuristic exchange they initiate by watching her.
Until about 15 minutes into the performance it is unclear whether Zondi has envisaged any narrative direction for Cinema. Just when the bubble wrap crackles begin to swell as though the audience is about to leave the room, Zondi begins an almost imperceptibly slow march down his passage. As he passes each of the other performers in their stations, they seem to come alive. Each dance is unique to the character who performs it. The soundtrack to this slow procession is Shirley Bassey’s Losing My Mind, sung by the bag lady (Dumisile Mqadi).
By the end of Zondi’s march, the performers have danced themselves into a frenzy. Samele Mzinyane, who plays the young man, spins in circles, with his head lolling, and the township Lolita writhes on the floor, cradling a doll. At this point it is clear that Cinema is a study of mindfulness and the limits of sanity.
The performance space, around which we shuffle and watch, is an avatar for the protagonist’s own mind as he walks alone like a Christ on the way to a private Golgotha.
Zondi is open about the personal cathartic elements of his performances. They are an ongoing process of facing the “demons” of his past, he says. For him a Standard Bank Young Artist Award is an affirmation of this journey. “It means … I will always have a space to crush my demons,” he says.