The plight of two threatened species — the jackass penguin and classical ballet — was highlighted at the launch of a new Pact production. Stanley Peskin reports
WHEN Nedbank, which is celebrating its fifth year of involvement with The Green Trust, undertook the part sponsorship of Pact Ballet’s presentation of David Bintley’s Still Life at the Penguin Cafe, it stated the pressing need to conserve two threatened species: the jackass penguin and classical ballet.
Bintley’s ballet was first performed by the Royal Ballet in 1988, and was justifiably praised by the London critics not only for its rollicking comedy, elegance and richness of invention, but for its searching and moving exploration of our own human links with the animal world. Bintley’s inspiration is David Dav’s Domesday Book of Animals. His cast of extinct and endangered species includes the Utah longhorn ram, the Texas kangaroo rat, Humboldt’s hog-nosed skunk flea, the Southern Cape zebra and the Brazilian woolly monkey. One particularly powerful episode shows the plight of the Rain Forest people.
At the Nedbank dinner given in the Elephant House at the Johannesburg Zoo to launch this double project, the guests and members of the media were requested to dress in black and white. In the several speeches made during the evening by representatives of both the commercial and artistic worlds, our resemblance to the animal world was a recurring theme.
It became clear that although not everyone thinks about the welfare of jackass penguins or for that matter about any other endangered animal, there does seem to be some consensus of opinion that endangered species should be protected, that somehow the survival of animals and birds is important to our own survival.
At a time when there is so much uncertainty about the future of the performing arts, Nedbank has indicated that the subsidy of the ballet is worthwhile and that ballet is a part of the nation’s health rather than a colourful and casual entertainment.
Indeed, many critics have made the large and legitimate claim that dance itself has had a decisive influence in socialising — that is to say, in moralising — the human species. The great choreographer and dancer Martha Graham passionately believed that “the history of dance is the social history of the world”. Nor is she alone in believing that every dance, whatever form it takes, reflects and protects the culture that produces it.
The threat to classical ballet has coincided not only with an economic recession, but also with a gradual waning of the public’s, and even some reviewers’, belief in its importance.
It is true that many ballets come from a more or less distant past, yet it is possible and profitable to read them for contemporary meaning or for meanings which are interestingly relevant to the modern imagination.
Moreover, classical ballet has become a perfectly creditable career for a young man or woman whose qualifications no longer include the need to be born in a band box or theatrical digs. Instead the training is long and strenuous, and now there is the painful recognition that ballet and their livelihoods cannot survive without subsidy.
At the end of this remarkable 30-minute ballet, all the animals, with the exception of the great auk (extinct since 1844), are admitted into an ark.
Here in South Africa, dancers, choreographers and artistic directors are about to enter a nuclear winter of the arts. They, like the jackass penguins, need to be rescued from this bleakness and lack of shelter. Nedbank has shown the way to the building of a very needful ark.
* Still Life at the Penguin Cafe opens at the State Theatre, Pretoria, on August 30. It will be flanked by Balanchine’s Rubies and Choo San Goh’s In the Glow of the Night.