THERE’S a rumour doing the rounds here that the Grahamstown Festival will be renamed the Grahamstown Dance Umbrella next year. But before you uncork the champagne, don your gumboots and organise a tickertape parade in celebration of a discipline that has finally come of age, it should be mentioned that dance wins the “flavour of the fest” title through default.
If you’re the kind of culture-monger who’s seen The Sound of Music six times, Grahamstown is for you. It is simply unrivalled in done-to-death revivalism. Sure, there are the occasional loose canons who believe that the ABC of the South African cultural experience doesn’t begin with apartheid and end with NSA ANCP (new South African angst, nostalgia and creative paralysis). Fringe playwright Mike van Graan makes that very point in Dinner Talk — a trilogy which turns white papers, cross-cultural sex, crime and other conflicts of the new South Africa into viable subject matter.
But is dance really saying something more exciting about life and itself than its more constrained cultural counterparts? Not if it’s dance as in the seductive specialities performed by the Pact Dance Company. Death and the Maiden (by Robert North) and Pedestrian (by Sue Abrahams) are exquisite examples of contemporary classicism, but they make Martha Graham seem over the edge by comparison.
And Young Artist Award winner Vincent Mantsoe? Now there’s a beautiful dancing bird in flight. Superb technique, sensitive presence and characterisation. But given Men Jaro, his latest work — an Afro- Euro-Asian variation on his two previous signature pieces, Hanano and Gula Matari — one wonders whether he isn’t in danger of becoming conceptually land-locked.
With formulas prevailing on the mainstream, it’s no wonder that fringe works like Talk 2 Much and Unspeakable Story have been punted as having more in common than titles with a predilection for speech. As dance-theatre, they succeed not in breaking ground, but rather in piling theatre (as in talk) on to dance (as in steps).
The result — as in Gary Gordon’s Unspeakable Story — is a stylistic sandwich with virtuoso choreography and a suitably melodramatic script (courtesy of Reza de Wet) and several other genres thrown in with admirable ease by Andrew Buckland. Based on Magritte’s biography, Unspeakable Story provides some insights into the surrealist artist’s obsession with faceless images, and excels in brickwork. But it never really frees itself from its own quotation marks to create a new dance vocabulary.
The title of Talk 2 Much speaks for itself. Directed by Marthinus Basson and performed by two delightful dancers who talk incessantly about their different cultural and domestic backgrounds while performing obligatory chorus line rituals, the piece provides a backstage peek into the world of bruised bones, bunions and blisters. But that’s where the conversation ends. The language remains the same: essentially conventional dance mixed with theatre, or essentially conventional theatre mixed with dance.
But happily, two companies at the fest have demonstrated that a post-modern recipe of eclecticism can produce deliciously new dance cuisine. Zimbabwe’s Tumbuka — probably the most exciting dance company in the southern hemisphere – — and KwaZulu-Natal’s Playhouse Dance Company have been “kick-starting” conceptual sensibilities with their energetic renditions of works by independent choreographers, among them Boyzie Cekwana, Robyn Orlin, Mark Hawkins and Neville Campbell.
Embracing a multitude of styles with conceptual adventure and technical flair, they’re performing works that pay homage to, yet transcend, tradition, moving into the realm of mixed-media movement and performance installation.
As for the rest, if it’s ground-breaking work you’re looking for, you’d be better off digging a trench. It’s a lot easier than sifting through the cultural flea-market in search of stuff that hasn’t been seen, said or done before.