DANCE
Naked on a goat – Market Theatre, Newtown Reviewed by: HAZEL FRIEDMAN
IF Robyn Orlin were an artwork, I’d buy her in bulk. She, more than any other artist has straddled, subverted and transcended the boundaries of art-making in all its forms. And her latest offering, Naked on a Goat (see picture – Backstage metamorphosis: Fikile Maswanganye and Tania Herbst in Naked on a Goat), resonates on so many levels that one almost feels the need to capture each vignette on a VCR and rewind it in order to unsheath its multiple symbolic layers.
Curtains, blankets, skins, flesh, clothes, veils — these are the metaphors around which Orlin’s post-apocalyptic story of Salomé revolves. But biblical references form only part of a dense yet paradoxically accessible commentary on contemporary morals and mores. In fact, if one had to search for an alternative subtext to Naked on a Goat, it might be Maid in South Africa, for Orlin weaves an acerbically accurate picture of domestic relations in middle-class suburbia.
In scenes definitely not recommended for middle-ground sensibilities, her trinity of Salómes perform rites of labour and rebellion among the artefacts (and fictions) of the white middle class, transforming movement and materials into the realm of performance-installation. Placing banal objects — actually they are more participants than props — in symbolically-charged groups of seven (plates, pineapples, petticoats and pieces of raw meat) Orlin cuts right to the bone of her subject matter.
She conflates the concepts of tomb and womb in birth and death rituals which — aided by primitively ingenious lighting effects — seem to take place in the bowels of a post- cataclysmic earth. She transforms her Salómes from sirens to spitfires and ultimately suicide squads. She superimposes Shangaan cloths on classical tutus, pointing a parodic finger at the intersection of Western and African conventions and, using found objects in a multi-coloured kitchen display, pokes fun at the “skinsations” of the rainbow nation.
In many respects, Orlin has turned traditional theatre inside out. Backstage becomes onstage, and process — the untidy bits that are normally tucked out of sight — becomes intertwined with the pristine finished product.
Threads from her most recent works are woven tightly into the cloth of this present performance in the form of a video by Stephen Hobbs. Comprising images of screen icons interspersed with scenes of the slaughter of a goat, filmed in montage sequences reminiscent of Eisenstein, Orlin seems to be offering a parable on sacrifice and scapegoats.
Unlike the ancient custom in which the sins of men would be offloaded onto a goat which would then be chased into the hills, taking the sins with it, Orlin’s scapegoats are women who, although objectified and exploited through myth and history, always fight back.
Sometimes the edges of her entertainingly idiosyncratic vision — courageously delivered by dancers Tania Herbst, Fikile Maswanganye and Busisiwe Ngebulana — become blunted through excessive repetition. Sometimes the intended catharsis is received with numbness or nervous laughter on the part of her audience.
But there is a poignant rationale behind the sometimes in-yer-face didacticism of Orlin’s messages. Outside the theatre hangs a modest epitaph to choreographer Marlene Blom, who was killed in a car crash over Easter. In a discipline which is becoming increasingly dominated by men, Blom, like Orlin — in vastly different ways and to varying degrees – – represented a rare and dwindling breed of women choreographers who have attempted to forge a new language of creative expression by fusing movement with image and sound in a synaesthetic embrace.
Unlike Blom’s short-lived contribution, though, Orlin’s work is not in danger of erasure. Like the branded goats in this remarkable piece of movement theatre, Orlin’s contribution to contemporary culture will be indelibly stamped on South African dancers, choreographers and audiences alike for generations to come.
Naked on a Goat runs at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, until May 18