DANCE: Suzy Bell
HE recently presented a paper on “Culture in South Africa” to Art International in New York, then nipped across to Scotland to choreograph a Scottish dance theatre company and then leaped across the continent to Vienna to attend a workshop with choreographers from Bulgaria to Japan.
He’s Boysie Cekwana, multi-award winning choreographer and one of South Africa’s finest. Boysie is back in Durban this week to perform in the FNB Vita Dance Shongololo Festival at the Playhouse Drama Theatre. It’s a free platform to encourage and promote young experimental choreographers whether they’re into ballet or gumboot dancing.
Cekwana resigned from The Playhouse Dance Company earlier this year and he says: “The official version is that I need to expand and experiment,” and the unofficial version is, “I need to expand and experiment. But I also feel there are people who can make a change and generate more excitement for dance in Durban, but are not really doing it. ”
Although Cekwana admits the Durban dance scene is very small, he says dance festivals like Dance Shongololo are an excellent example of what Durban dance desperately needs. “Durban dance needs to be more experimental.”
In Like Posing Pictures with a Smile … – a commission from The Foundation for the Creative Arts, on November 17 – Cekwana incorporates two zany Durban actors, Bheki Mkhwane and Siduduzo Kawula, into what should be a riveting new dance piece. “I constantly experiment to elaborate my range of dance. Like right now I’m using actors. I refuse to compartmentalise my dance to a certain style. I don’t work at having a certain style, I just dance.”
FNB Vita arts administrator, Georgina Thomson says the Dance Shongololo, now in its third year, is set to become an annual dance event. The highlights of the dance festival, says Thomson, are: Boysie Cekwana’s Like Posing Pictures with a Smile … and his Me for You and You for Me and from the Playhouse Dance Company, Andrew Gilder’s Hand Me the Coffee and No One Will Get Hurt.
Gauteng’s Jayesperi Moopen’s Talas in Conversation and Parajanmam will be very interesting as Moopen, an Indian dance specialist, interprets Indian dance into a contemporary dance form. Vusabantu Ngema’s Memory is a new work and is well worth seeing.
Nicky du Plessis, a judge at last year’s Dance Shongololo, says: “One of the things that impresses me the most is that FNB is supporting dance as a theatre art form and giving people a chance to experiment and create indigenous dance forms.
“We are also finding young choreographers who may have the potential to be as talented as Boysie Cekwana.”
The FNB Vita Dance Shongololo is on at the Playhouse Drama Theatre from November 14 to 17 with a fringe programme this Sunday