Dance theatre is a popular innovator amid the anguish and protest that dominate the festival, writes Mark Gevisser
THE photograph shows a man and a woman jiving in a shebeen; mugging, minstrel-like, at the camera. It could be a publicity pic from any one of a number of productions at Grahamstown this year _ Barney Simon’s production of Can Them-ba’s The Suit, perhaps, or Phyllis Klotz’s Kwela Bafana, both set in that receptacle for South African nostalgia, the Kofifi ’50s. But it’s not: it’s a photograph from the Lost Photographers exhibition; taken in the late ’50s by Drum photographer Ranjith Kally, from Alan Paton’s play Mkhambane.
Kally’s photo is one of the few moments of nostalgia that curator Gordon Metz, of the Mayibuye Centre in Cape Town, has allowed.
Most of the images by six of South Africa’s most undervalued photographers reveal, once more, the anguish and the tension of life under apartheid: Leon Levson’s complex, world- encompassing landscapes of migrant hostel life; Eli Weinberg’s moments of proto-struggle; Ernest Cole’s gritty documents of disability and dispossession. Bob Gosani’s astonishing 1954 series of naked black prisoners doing the “tauza” dance for the warders, to show that they are not concealing anything up their rectums, renders transparent the very apparatus of apartheid.
In the visitors’ book at the Lost Photographers exhibition, Audrey and Billy McCartney from East London wrote: “I feel such shame”, a sentiment articulated by many other white visitors. Vusisiziwe Mchunu from Durban wrote: “A great moving show which reminds us of the horrid evils of man’s inhumanity to man. A beacon of hope in the long process of transformation.”
Between the McCartneys and Mchunu we find ourselves, at this year’s festival, grappling with history and memory: as in the political world, we are enmeshed in the dialectic of truth and reconciliation.
In The Orphans of Qumbu, back in Grahamstown for its second season, Capab’s Michael Williams spins a crude, if effective, allegory for reconciliation: black children, orphaned by decadent white petits bourgeois, make amends with their oppressors, and everyone happily sings “peace is coming” _ _ la Sarafina! _ in the finale. It’s not surprising the organisers want this message a second time round. But there’s nothing challenging _ no cultural truth commission _ in works like Qumbu.
And, conversely, despite the astonishing effusion of talent in the Nelspruit-based Amakhwenkwe Cultural Group, a work like Eita Da! Hoezit!?, brought to the festival as part of its community outreach programme, tells the story of our past with every protest-theatre clich, we’ve ever seen: the police raid, the buffoonish cops, the drunk savant.
There’s always been an element of Gibson Kente-style music- hall burlesque in protest theatre, but Eita Da! Hoezit!? turns this stock repertoire into sharply timed comic farce _ apartheid as cabaret. In the last act, a drunk taxi washer embarks on a half-hour rant about the new South Africa; the basic text is “so what’s new?” Stunned into silence, his companion on stage (also drunk) finally says: “Sorry to remind you about the past.”
Sorry to remind you about the past. Two of the exhibitions at the festival _ Lost Photographers and Anne Frank in the World _ wag warning “lest we forget” fingers; and the latter offers tangible and creative ideas for how we can deal with the past in the future. But politics in South African theatre finds itself reduced to two kinds of nostalgia: for the melting-pot myths of Sophiatown or, slightly more complicated, for the prerogatives of defiance and resistance that the 1970s and 1980s offered us.
How invigorating, then, to see a performance like Get Hard on the Fringe. Written by gay American performance artist Tim Miller and adapted by Anton Burggraaf and Peter Hayes, it pushes the boundaries of our understanding of both theatre and politics. Hayes’ performance is honest and searing; his interaction with the audience motivated rather than gimmicky; his exploration into sexuality, power and death transformative in a truly political sense.
Like it, in its complex formulation of politics, is Robyn Orlin’s The Explosion of the Stars Is Not Only Reserved for Ticket-Holders, part of the Napac Dance Company’s repertoire. It’s a prime exemplar of the kind of Pina Bausch-influenced “dance theatre” that is becoming more popular in South Africa _ dance about life, not dance about dance.
There’s nothing specifically African about The Explosion of the Stars. But it aspirates a nihilism very familiar to South Africans: raincoat-clad dancers destroy books; a neurotic stage manager in a pith helmet frantically and purposelessly moves mobile floodlights about.
If the Grahamstown Festival is anything to go by, then dance theatre, rather than pure theatre, has become our cultural innovator. Dance plays abstract expressionism to theatre’s static figurativeness; dance doesn’t pin ideas down to linear stories the way theatre does.
Work like that of Hayes and Orlin _ and Jay Pather, whose Raw Dog Night fuses the showiness of cabaret drag with the politics of the body _ ruptures both the formal and the conceptual fixed spaces in which South African theatre is currently caught: the endless circle of nostalgia and protest that reproduces, as in a hall of sepia-tinted mirrors, images of Sof’town.