Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg
It seemed like it was never going to happen; the eagerly-awaited moment when Johannesburg’s performance underground would raise itself from latex-clad haunches and step into the mainstream clubland spotlight. The first public suspension in a Johannesburg nightclub; theatre for 2000. Two boys, 40 hooks, a metre off the ground at Gass.
And man, did they milk it. Week after week, nightclub after nightclub, bad DJ after bad DJ, pretty, glossy little flyers advertising the performance were doing the rounds, whetting the collective modern primitive/SM/kink appetite, moistening the rubber knickers and all.
“Will they actually do it?” asked the morbidly curious. “Exactly how will they execute it?” asked the ever-burgeoning army of trendy, pierced folk (at the show itself, each hook to enter flesh was scrutinised by this crowd and judgement swiftly delivered. “Hmm, the third one’s way too tight. What’s he doing? Aw c’mon Eddie man.” Hell, every Sandton babe with a belly ring was an expert; every dude with a nipple piercing more hardercore than the next).
Muttered one jaded globetrotting voyeur at the bar: “They’ve been doing this same old suspension for decades. In the Seventies Fakir Musafar ritually suspended himself by his nipples until the flesh tore and he dropped. What are they doing that’s new? Where’s the spirit?”
The first public suspension in a Johannesburg nightclub was, you see, not so much about breaking the mould of the local performance idiom, nor was it an exploration of subversive communal ritual. Let’s face it, once your mother knows you’re being suspended on a Friday night you may just as well kiss the notion of subversion and the underground goodbye.
And as for theatre experiments, well, the breathlessly slick show seemed to act in isolation, too drawn out to sustain itself, unable to tap the zeitgeist of the dancefloor, unresolved in its intentions. But slick as hell.
The show at Gass was, after all, about hype. Publicity, money, club cred and beauty. TV crews jostled for position as Graham donned his surgical gear and, a twinkle in his eye, began the methodical process of piercing hooks through the flesh of two extremely calm and brave young men – one on his stomach, the other on his back.
And beautiful it was when he finally, finally pulled on a chain to raise them up into the gaze of the formerly- fidgetting club crowd. Lights glistening off a gorgeous polished steel structure; the bizarre calm of pain. “Jiss, I skeem number six is gonna give. Now if it was me, bro …”