With Dance Umbrella under way, HAZEL FRIEDMAN speaks to the grande dame of choreography, Sylvia Glasser
CHOREOGRAPHERS, dancers and audiences at this year’s FNB Vita Dance Umbrella have all been asking: where is Sylvia Glasser? Though the veteran choreographer has not presented an individual performance under her Moving into Dance rubric, she has been visible in her absence. Dance Umbrella has little bits of Glasser everywhere.
Launched in 1989, Dance Umbrella has become South Africa’s most popular showcase for contemporary choreography. At its best, it has offered South African dancers and choreographers the chance to articulate new visions of movement by stretching the old and embracing the new. At its worst, it has become a series of appropriated styles plucked like no-name brands off a supermarket shelf, used and discarded with little comprehension of origin or significance.
This year’s Dance Umbrella seems to be a bit of both. But if there is one person — apart from Robyn Orlin — – responsible for the more mature visions informing some of the choreography, it is Glasser.
In a career spanning 30 years, Glasser has witnessed and actively participated in the gusts of transformation blowing through the skirts of local contemporary dance, particularly in the last four years.
“There are enormous spiritual changes between dance then and now,” says the choreographer who began fusing African and Western dance genres in 1977, long before the term multi-cultural attained the trendy weight it carries today. “Yet in material terms, dancers today are still paupers, still carrying the legacy of ‘the cultural cringe’ whereby we undervalue our own creativity while the rest of the world heaps accolades on us.”
But Glasser prefers to focus on the bouquets than the slings and arrows accompanying the status of unsung contemporary dance pioneer.
Her personal files bulge with letters of acclaim from Miami, Princeton and New Jersey universities, where she has presented papers and performances to enraptured audiences.
“I love imparting the anthropological and educational aspects of dance as well as witnessing the processes of change in dancers. My academic background [she has an MA from Miami University] has never removed me from the practical and intuitive aspects of the discipline.”
Glasser tries to infuse the more cerebral components of choreography with its instinctive, primeval side. She also draws a definite distinction between cultural or stylistic appropriation and appreciation.
“It is essential never to trivialise other cultures, and to examine how and why they can be integrated into new dance forms — not by using the magpie method but in order to create new, syncretic, organic artforms.”
She inculcates this dance philosophy into her students, the results of which have already been seen in the work of acclaimed young choreographers Vincent Mantsoe and Themba Nhlalindi — both graduates of Glasser’s year- long choreography course — who are two of the drawcards of this year’s Dance Umbrella.
“I teach choreography in a structural way,” she explains. “Initially I try ‘unlearning’ the students and stripping movement of all meaning and emotion, before introducing structures to which the students add their own meaning.”
In a class consisting of 18 students at the Braamfontein Recreation Centre gym, which doubles up as a dance studio — that is, when it is not being used as a squash court — Glasser’s first choreographic project revolves around the concept of walking, followed by a focus on the relationship between hands and feet. “It sounds easy, but it’s an incredibly intensive, disciplined course in which African dance is taught in conjunction with communication, study methods and voice development.”
She adds: “There are no hard and fast rules for choreography but one can recognise successful choreography through the way in which the imagination is used, line and space manipulated, rhythms created and stories told. Dance is, after all, about the interconnectedness of all things.”
The FNB Vita Dance Umbrella runs at the Wits Theatre, Braamfontein, until March 16