Those cheekbones were just made for the stage — very sexy!” This opinion was delivered during a performance of Gregory Vuyani Maqoma’s Ketima. The comment was, quite naturally, directed at the choreographer himself.
A superficial assessment of one of our most important dancer-choreographers? Granted. But it also conveyed a sense of Maqoma’s striking visual effect in performance — an aesthetic advantage that belies the depth and range of his choreographic vision.
‘Sexy” is a supple adjective because it can apply as much to a person’s headspace as to their appearance.
This works particularly well in Maqoma’s case because his physicality is simply a sheath for an acutely intelligent and humanistic awareness. Mix in a streak of the psychoanalytical and a highly developed curosity, and one has a truly interesting artist.
Until recently his inquisitiveness has been focused internally, teasing out the strands of a ‘personal anthropology”. A large slice of Maqoma’s repertoire is devoted to answering: ‘Who am I in this new South African set-up?” Predictable for a young black artist, one might argue except that Maqoma has an unpredictable take on the world.
‘The work often uses the stories of others and tries to find a link to my personal biography,” he says. Maqoma’s edge appears in his treatment of these ‘others”.
He can use the poles represented by Hector Peterson, or the life of drag artist Miss Thandi (born Raymond Vuyo Matinyana) — whose international career made him one of the country’s most unusual cultural ambassadors — as equally valid illustrations of iconic South African lives.
A refinement to Maqoma’s query goes: ‘How am I placed within my culture?” Many South African artists draw on their cultural traditions as a stimulus for creativity. Our contemporary dance landscape, in particular, is littered with excrutiating attempts to transform cultural knowledge into engaging theatre.
Maqoma takes this idea further, and dares to interrogate the traditional. His finding, after having experienced the circumcision school’s rite of passage, for example, is surprising in its simplicity. ‘I came out the same as I went in,” he says. ‘The tradition does not define who I am.”
Ketima (2003) is possibly his most popular work, and marks a transition out of the autobiographical phase. The piece finds Maqoma looking back at the innocence of childhood and the wonder of first encounters.
Stepping away from theatre convention, his casting includes a trio of previously untrained performers. ‘I wanted to work with people who didn’t have a preconception of what to bring to a dance work,” he explains.
Virtually Blond (2004) completes the move away from introspection and cements his fascination with the universe beyond himself. The piece was created over about eight months and saw Maqoma becoming ‘custodian” of the intensely personal stories of the five dancers from Moving into Dance Mophatong.
These intimacies form the basis of a theatrical inquisition of notions of gender, age and existence that slips beneath layers of psychology to expose the raw nerve at the centre of many human lives.
Continuing his artistic evolution, Maqoma is performing in the self-conceived and directed Somehow Delightful. This time the tangents of dance, music, film and visual art are woven in response to the great South African question: ‘What do we have to celebrate, 10 years into democracy?”
Ironically, Maqoma and his collaborators on the project — Palesa Letlaka-Nkosi (film), Nhlanhla Mahlangu (music) and Clifford Charles (visual art) — found that celebration can often be constrained by memory, while memory is triggered by the literal or metaphorical scars we bear.
‘Each scar tracks an individual story,” he says.
If demand is a measure of success, then Ketima has already outstripped Maqoma’s prior achievements. By the end of October the work’s 2004 touring schedule will have included London, Zurich, Grahamstown, Durban, three cities in Holland and 10 in Mexico.