The recent deaths of two dancers highlight the stress and pressures of the dance world, write Charl Blignaut and Hazel Friedman
In two weeks the Pact Dance Company will premiere a new season of their work in the Wits Theatre in Johannesburg. It will be a harrowing evening for the critically acclaimed company from Pretoria.
For it will then be one month since the theatre witnessed the sudden and violent deaths of Paula Preller and Collin Myburgh, two dancers with the Johannesburg Dance Theatre (JDT), the performance company of the Johannesburg Dance Foundation. Preller and Myburgh, principal lead partners, had been in final rehearsal on a showcase piece called Do or Die.
But Do or Die was never to become Prellers crowning achievement, her last work before leaving the dance world to join her husband, Pastor Gavin Preller, in the ministry and to spend more time with her two young children.
Following the deaths, the JDT is in tatters, and the dance world is struggling desperately to come to terms with the violent turn of events that saw two particularly fine dancers cut down in their prime.
The Pact Dance Company, for more than a year also home to Myburgh, has asked their creative director, Esther Nasser, for a minutes silence before the curtain rises. Theyve also asked her to make a speech, acknowledging the deep sense of loss and emotional rawness they feel.
But there are, according to Nasser, no conclusions, even after the burials. Thats the thing, normally a burial would be final theres no sense that this thing is behind us yet.
When Nasser calls for a minute of silence, no doubt many in the audience will be remembering the last time the dance community was brought together by a tragedy. Not too many months ago, another of the JDTs principals, David Seperepere, committed suicide. He was seemingly at a loss, unable to deal with living with HIV as full-blown Aids threatened.
Ironically, Seperepere was Prellers former leading man. As so many people pointed out this week, three people have died violent deaths in one company within a year. Something must be wrong. Personal problems must, they say, have been heightened by professional insecurity.
Several dancers all requesting anonymity feel that somehow what went down at the JDT is symptomatic of larger problems in South African dance. Each said that the JDT has been a troubled company even in a country of limited dance resources, high stress, low wages and a general public lack of respect for the discipline.
It is a discipline that demands absolutes from mind and body, in which no sacrifice is too great and in which ailment or insecurity is regarded contemptuously as an obstruction rather than an inevitable symptom of the human condition. It is also an art form whose practitioners are particularly dependent on audience adulation for self-affirmation. Earning accolades means setting impossibly high standards of physical perfection and making it means surviving endless rites of pain and humiliation.
But times are changing. In other countries, dance is becoming demystified, treated as a profession and governed by the rules that operate in other jobs. Unfortunately, South African dance remains ruled by an iron fist.
As one of the countrys contemporary dance veterans explains, dance has always subscribed to the authoritarian do-as-I- say school of thought. Weve been tough on ourselves and on others because weve always believed that only toughness brings out the best. She adds: Unfortunately, weve constructed these ivory towers around ourselves, too insecure to make the transition from treating dancers as dance machines to respecting them as human beings.
This is the context in which the Johannesburg Dance Foundationwas born. It was established as the Equinoxe Dance Theatre in 1980 by a team of four dancers: Grayham Davies, Corinna Lowry, Naomi Isaacson and Tossie van Tonder, at a time when dance was widely perceived as an activity performed by pampered white girls in satin and tulle.
A contemporary dance company? Apart from creative mavericks like Robyn Orlin, Sylvia Glasser and Adele Blank, that concept belonged in an exotic place called overseas. The early lean years were fed with a round-the-clock weekday-weekend regimen of practice at Wendy de la Harpes dance studio in Houghton. But by 1987 when the foundation, aided by the Sullivan Fund, had moved into its Doornfontein premises, it had succeeded in straddling the conflicting worlds of Sandton and Soweto.
Practically all South Africas foremost black dancers have done time with the JDFs outreach programmes. These initiatives were undertaken by Lowry, who remained Daviess partner until their acrimonious split in 1996 due to conflicting management styles. But already in 1994, the Davies-Lowry pas de deux was out of sync (Lowry has refused to comment and Davies has not responded to calls).
Without exception, former dancers at the foundation blame Davies for the rupture. A demon for detail as well as an unflinchingly committed choreographer, he has been described variously as a monster and the Mussolini of contemporary dance, capable of making his dancers soar one moment and crushing them under foot the next.
And it was within this context, that Myburgh, the street-smart bodybuilder from gangstaland, with the pseudo-American accent and wings on his feet, came into conflict with Davies.
Maybe no one will ever really know the nature of the relationship between Myburgh and Preller. Focused, nurturing, religious, with a brilliant future are some of the epithets used to describe her. Passionate, insecure, volatile with an equally brilliant future is how colleagues describe him.
Rumours about their relationship abound: they were lovers; he was obsessed; she was obsessed; she supported him in his fights against management; he resented her life of privilege.
But what has indisputably come to light is that Myburgh and Davies were at war. Myburgh, who won the Nedbank Young Achiever Award in 1992, was fired by Davies in 1996, but returned after his spell with Pact. Myburgh had punched Davies shortly before the tragic deaths occurred. And both Myburgh and Davies were under stress in the previous weeks.
The new dance season was taking its toll on Davies. A fellow member of the JDT, Gladys Agulhas also a close friend of Myburgh had fallen ill. Apart from temporary assistance from dancer Jeanette Ginslow, the volatile CEO was overseeing preparations on his own.
Myburghs friends recall that the dancer was experiencing his own trial by fire. He had been in therapy for a while. But within the dance structures he had no recourse to help.
We tend to think of dancers as superhuman, said Nasser. But South African dancers are particularly vulnerable. There is a lot of uncertainty about the future … and we carry that stress into the workplace.