Gwen Ansell
At last, an overseas impresario is taking an interest in South African music. Euro Stages Peter Ultee who has also promoted opera, and folkloric shows from West Africa departed on Sunday with the 40-strong Sikulu Theatre Group and their production The Journey for a commercial tour that so far includes theatre bookings in the Netherlands, France and Ireland.
The Journey, too, is a folkloric show. Using the peg of the Land Act and rural dispossession, it takes three hours to follow a young couple from an idyllic village full of beautiful traditional song and dance, to the city (where she is raped and he is robbed), through some perfunctory toyi-toyi and banner-waving and a eulogistic vocal tribute to Nelson Mandela, and back to the village to reclaim their land.
The vivacity of a hardworking, sweet-voiced and talented cast cant disguise the problems with the material. South Africas unique and distinctive traditions are all stirred together into an amorphous, exotic, decontextualised African pap.
For watchers so inclined, the old apartheid message of dont come to Joburg, Jim can easily be read as a subtext to the portrayal of city life. Ultees theatrical conception of the African as other is neatly if unwittingly expressed in his assertion that The message of the show is vitality … In Europe, we live with our heads; here, people live with their hearts.
Whats disturbing is how little this one of our few current commercial cultural exports has to do with the real South Africa of the 1990s. Folk traditions still live: today they inhabit a modern musical space in the work of Pops Mohamed, Madala Kunene and Amampondo.
There is a contemporary music of the cities: from Bongo Maffins kwaito and reggae to the jazz of McCoy Mrubatha and Bheki Khoza. Whats the point of showcasing overseas today something that reprises albeit unintentionally the 1980s Amandla show, without either that productions coherent politics or its stunning jazz score?