Many will remember this year’s National Arts Festival as a body fest. The body naked and the body bedecked in resplendent attire; the body available for anyone with a little cash and the body chaste; the body loved and the body abused; a female soul imprisoned in the male body; the body corralled in prison and the body lashing out in violence.
Films, plays and dances that I watched involved a scene, a sequence or two in which the body was celebrated, examined, loved or mutilated.
A highlight of the festival was the Baxter Theatre offering I Am My Own Wife, a one-man play performed by Jeremy Crutchley and directed by Janice Honeyman. It’s about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a dissident German transvestite who survived the Nazi dictatorship and the communist regime that replaced it in the German Democratic Republic. Slipping seamlessly in and out of 40 different characters, both male and female, Crutchley’s show was both a triumph and a sensation.
From Réunion, the Indian Ocean island run by the French, came Mâ Ravan’, a Theatre Talipot production that examined the fate of the grand marrons, slaves (many of them forcibly removed from Africa’s east coast) rebelling and fleeing from the plantations owned by their new masters. The punishment for getting caught was dire: one’s hands were chopped off.
The bodies of the four actors glistened with sweat, the auditorium was choked with incense and the ravanne (a round drum found on most Indian Ocean islands) echoed serenely into the night.
The production, directed by Philippe Pelen Baldini, was at times shaky and too long, but was an evocative — if uneasy — tribute to the bodies and souls who craved freedom and risked much to rid themselves of their shackles and inhumane masters. As I watched the performance, I comforted myself that slavery — at least as practised in centuries past — has been abolished. I also wondered about its legacy for the descendants of both the enslaved and enslaver.
The dance piece, Body of Evidence, conceived and directed by Jay Pather and the Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre, is a delirious production that examines the body. “The body is temple and fortress, porous transparency, as well as taut, unrelenting opacity,” said the director’s notes in the festival guide.
Pather seems to be asking what happens to a body when it has grown through the smithy of experience. The production considered “the enduring and perpetual containment of memories of violence in our bones”. The result was a sustained assault on our conception of the received know-ledge about sexuality, modernity and what is considered normal. Pushing the boundaries of dance, convention and meaning, Body of Evidence was bewildering and madly theatrical. It merged genres, genders and sexualities in ways that left me both confused and entranced at times. It would question anyone’s sense of normality.
The fringe drama production, Skinny Genes, examined South Africa’s notions of beauty. Directed by Flo Makale and featuring Nomalanga Nkosi and Lindi Magubane, the production featured a slim woman’s struggles to gain weight so that she might gain social acceptance in a world in which big is beautiful. In an interview with Cue, the festival newspaper, Nkosi said she went to a mixed school and her white classmates thought of her as beautiful and yet when she went home her big aunts would advise her to eat more.
In a nation as diverse as South Africa the play seems to say that there is not a single notion of truth and that beauty should be universally accepted. All notions of it should be valid.
Staying with explorations of the body, another fringe production titled Breasts are Beautiful presented something wholly literal. The show’s battle cry is that all breasts, whatever size and shape, are beautiful. It featured six women — of all colours — examining their breasts. Apparently each has a notion of the meaning of their breasts as passed down by tradition.
The production plays on the stereotypes of breasts. It questions whether breasts have a “right” size and whether they are there only to titillate the male species, or whether they are merely a reproductive tool.
Written by Cecil Rautenbach and directed by Victor Grondel, the play was in parts hilarious but also delivered doses of didacticism. It ended predictably, though, with the actresses agreeing that all women ought to be proud of what they have.
The film programme of the National Arts Festival this year featured a Landmarks of World Cinema section, which showed the 1986 Philippines production Peeping. Elwood Perez’s feature is sexually graphic and deals with a pair of childhood friends who, when they grow up, take different paths. One goes to Manila, the capital, to seek her fortune. She doesn’t find it and sells her body and soul to whoever has a bit of cash.
Her chaste friend left in the village buries her sexuality in a Pharisaical version of righteousness. It’s not enough that she keeps her body in unimaginable chastity; she goes one step further and forces her world view on the girl children in the village.
The tragic end of the movie is at once appalling and moving, but it’s a script many here will find familiar, particularly women trying to redefine relations under male domination and those in societies caught between urbanisation and tradition.
Equally graphic was Thirteen Cents, based on the novel by Sello K Duiker, performed by Botswana teenagers Bokamoso Makole and Onkemetse Sebenyane. It’s about a child who runs away from home and, finding himself on the streets, becomes a rent boy.
It would be dishonest to say mutilation and abuse of the body is all that the festival doled out. There was more — there were Grahamstown’s adolescent mimes found at most busy street corners, their faces painted a ghostly white; there was the pantsula dance done by the Hip Pantsula Jive Dance group, doing their complex and urbane dance moves, bearing testimony to the body flexible.
Then there was the body aloft. A constant presence on the streets of the busy town were boys on stilts, high above ordinary mortals, looking down at the festival-goers.
This development initiative is spearheaded by Richard Antrobus and is meant to involve local youth in the festival. Antrobus, a master’s student in drama at Rhodes, was asked by festival director Ismail Mahomed to teach local youth the intricacies of stilt-walking. The resulting performances were rather unnerving and may have jolted audiences, but it helped the stiltsmen integrate into the festival spirit.
It was refreshing to watch and I suppose the local community should be integrated so that, eventually, they may also take ownership of this important event on their doorstep.