Theatre: Stanley Peskin
PACT Ballet’s presentation (in association with Nedbank) of David Bintley’s Still Life at the Penguin Cafe is an altogether triumphant experience. The company, in superb form, places before us the choreographer’s passionate lyric on the continuity of man, death, and nature. A playful and poignant obituary notice, Still Life strips us of our carefully constructed layers of self-protection as we are made to confront the fact of death and a gradual process of disappearing.
The ballet is constructed choreographically and scenically as a series of overpowering pictorial effects. Hayden Griffen’s sets and costumes are drenched in brilliant colours; the landscapes in which so many endangered species live are vast and lonely. Simon Jeffe’s cafe music, extraordinarily communicative and elegiac, enters integrally into the meaning.
Still Life alternates between comedy and pathos. In contrast to the irrepressible Texan kangaroo rat and Humboldt’s hog-nosed skunk flea (skilled in the art of Morris dancing) are a southern Cape zebra and a rain forest family.The sinuous beauty of the zebra is frighteningly counterpointed with a group of mannequin-like and mechanical women who, dressed in striped black and white, are a cruel parody of their victim.
The Mardi Gras, the penultimate scene in the ballet, is an astonishingly joyous and moving festivity in which the threatened are the celebrants. Nevertheless, the last tableau of survivors in the ark has a terrible poignancy, for the penguin who has been our host throughout the ballet is not included in the vision of safety. Ultimately, Still Life at the Penguin Cafe is an aching expression of need rather than fulfilment.