Stepping from the relentless glare of a Johannesburg summer morning into the cool darkness of the Wits Theatre is not unlike entering a secret, parallel universe.
One minute you’re dodging a stream of sausage-factory suits hurtling along the pavement to work, the next you’re watching a man in a loincloth sweep his arms over a sleeping female form, trembling lightly as the first fever of a trance takes hold.
“Um, check your spacing please,” calls choreographer Sylvia Glasser cautiously from the lighting box. Her company, Moving into Dance, is in final rehearsal for its performance at the gala showcase of the tenth anniversary of the annual FNB Vita Dance Umbrella – now a decade old – and Glasser is only getting to the lighting design today. She has been out of the country and the dancers had to learn their moves from a video of a 1987 performance of There’s a Dream Dreaming Us.
It’s a title derived from a San saying and to Glasser the piece treads a tightrope between dream and reality. This is trademark Afrofusion, an anthropologically-inspired meeting of modern Western dance and African ritual; a notion spearheaded by Glasser, one of the pioneers of contemporary dance in South Africa.
Twenty-one years ago, when Glasser left ballet to embark on a career in modern dance, the very thought of a black man in a loincloth manipulating the dreams of a white woman in a leotard was enough to put you behind bars. It is a testament to the dedication of the country’s dance practitioners that the Umbrella, a vital platform for the ever-burgeoning body of local contemporary work, saw the light of day in the first place.
On stage Glasser is starting to move things along. Today is the first time the dancers have tried on their costumes and even though Chanel’s flared pants are too long and they haven’t had a chance to test their elaborate make-up, everything’s under control. This is contemporary dance in South Africa. You learn to make do without resources. Even if you’re Moving Into Dance, one of the country’s most exportable companies.
A good part of the secret of their success is a brilliant young dancer and choreographer called Vincent Mantsoe. I settle deeper into a chair in the empty auditorium as Glasser takes her dancers aside and Mantsoe takes the stage to run through his gorgeously eclectic Afro-Eastern solo, Mpheyane.
“It means ‘deception’,” says Mantsoe to me later, “and it’s about this man who went off and explored different cultures. But in the process he loses his sense of belonging. He nearly goes mad. His ancestors come out of him and run away from him and he tries to catch them … He knows he must hold on to his roots.”
Mantsoe should know. He has, in the course of the last few years, taken his work to the farthest-flung corners of the globe. The company recently toured Africa after he won the African Contemporary Dance Award for choreography. It has been to Germany, New York, Holland, Australia, Stockholm, Isreal.
In many regards, the shy young man on stage is the epitome of the journey into the international spotlight that South African contemporary dance has travelled. Black boy, bright lights. Soweto street dancer with wings on his heels spots an advert for an audition and is given a bursary, honed by a dedicated white auntie, and, as the country opens up, is given the chance to sell the values of African dance to an infatuated world.
Mantsoe’s mother and aunt, I learn, are sangomas, and his faith in the ritual purgation of the ancestors, combined with a smattering of borrowed styles, informs a body of work that the international contemporary dance world could only have imagined existed.
South African dance may have been behind the times up until 1994, but right now it is more than just flavour of the month. It is at the forefront of a whole new trend in dance.
Having said all that, it is to become increasingly apparent to me over the next few days of watching rehearsals that there is a fair measure of resentment towards Mantsoe’s success from other companies. They feel that Moving into Dance is in a too- privileged position and that Mantsoe has forgotten who helped him up.
The real reason for their resentment actually stems from a lack of resources and from who gets what slice of the funding pie. Even with local dance soaring, resources back home are ridiculously underdeveloped. Audiences alone cannot sustain a company and dancers are often forced to commercialise to keep bread on the table. Who can blame a company for letting their dancers perform in music videos and Coca-Cola commercials when a local dancer will take home well under R2 000 a month? If they’re lucky. Dance troupes like Zimbabwe’s Tumbuka can only gasp at a figure like that.
“There is money for transport and rent and that’s it,” says the company’s showcase choreographer, Neville Campbell. “We do it because we love it.”
But limited resources are not what’s got Campbell’s juices boiling when I meet him for an interview the next morning. I have just watched a rehearsal of his new work, Have Mouth, Will Argue, and I am pretty damn bowled over. An angry monologue accompanies a girl dancing classical ballet while the seriously stunning Tumbuka dancers fling themselves about the stage, attached to chairs and smoking cigarettes. The level of physical experimentation in Campbell’s work has always been lauded in South Africa. In Zimbabwe, however, he has struggled to defend his decision not to employ traditional African dance in his repertoire.
Campbell’s new work is a result of a recent spell in Scotland where, as head of the Scottish Dance Theatre, he had several run- ins with dance funding bodies. They wanted him to stage full-length works with a more traditional element. Same old story.
He ploughs into our interview with a stunningly eloquent attack on local and international critics, funders, officials and all other “art pimps” who try to sway a company’s work in the direction of state interests, politically correct causes and blind trends. “Ten years ago there was a much healthier dance scene all around the world. At least there was respect for artists. Now there’s a whole lot of tokenist decision-making happening. Funders trying to influence the creative process. Critics dismissing works that audiences may love, but they have decided are too difficult or too easy or whatever …”
It is clear that Campbell has just sounded the alarm that will signal a whole new dance debate. Now that contemporary dance has risen in stature, these issues will inevitably come into play. It’s what happens when the marginal goes mainstream and as far as Campbell is concerned, artistic integrity is on the line. “I’m actually doing this work for all hardworking artists. They know who they are. The people who can maintain the courage of their convictions and not compromise themselves.”
Back in the auditorium he claps his hands twice and yells, “Okay, from the top.” His dancers groan and get to their feet.
“So how are we going to fly the birthday cake in without upsetting the lightbulbs,” I hear as I pass the lighting box back in the auditorium the next afternoon. The person talking can only be Robyn Orlin, doyenne of the more experimental edge in local dance. The duty of wishing the Umbrella a happy tenth birthday has fallen in her lap and before you can say “pli”, there comes Orlin, suspended by rope from the ceiling, wearing a tutu and 10 pairs of ballet shoes …
Orlin has won the Umbrella’s Vita Award for best choreographer more than anyone else, but, frustrated with the restrictions of the local scene, she accepted a Fullbright award to study performance art in Chicago. That her return to the country was marked by a new surge of acceptance of her work should mean that even the outer limits of dance have found a home in South African dance.
But Orlin is a maverick and in many regards a bit of an exception. Much of the gala will consist of good, clean, solid fusion and a lingering tinge of the ballet tradition that modern dance grew from and rebelled against. Ask Campbell, weirdos and other true artists don’t get government funding so easily.
Arriving at the theatre on the morning of the gala, I am startled to find the normally-abandoned auditorium alive with TV cameras, photographers and newspaper reporters. The Washington Ballet is in town, performing a work called Savanna, choreographed by another local wunderkind, Boyzie Cekwana.
Somehow it’s telling. We may have come a long way, but when a visiting ballet company is in town the media will bend over backwards to welcome them. A top local choreographer must make room for a passing TV crew as a gorgeous Latino dancer strips down to his stretch lycra shorts and assumes a pose that can only come from years of rigid ballet experience.
Watching the rehearsal, it occurs to me that this is the theatre that last year witnessed the brutal murder of two contemporary dancers. A fight in a changeroom got ugly and a knife was pulled. At the time it seemed clear that part of the reason for the tragedy stemmed from contemporary dance companies maintaining the ballet regimen. Ruthless discipline, state funding, body obsession and cold, authoritarian tutoring.
It’s a legacy that contemporary dance is still unable to shake off entirely and one gets the feeling that, even with 100 defiant and independent Orlins and Campbells, it is going to struggle to do so for at least another 10 years.
The FNBVita Dance Umbrella runs at Johannesburg’s Wits Theatre until March 21
“It’s become a real problem; meddling. There’s money if you will promise to work with a group of black gay women in wheelchairs, but not if you are pursuing your art. It’s a load of bollocks. I’m interested in quality and hard work.”
Funders trying to influence the creative
process. Critics dismissing works that audiences may love, but they have decided are too difficult or too easy or whatever