Nicholas Dawes Parties in Cape Town
`Fuck dance, let’s art” is something like a family motto for the hip UK record label Ninja Tune, and it was unsurprising to find it on a flyer for Friday’s SEXsmorgasbord party at the similarly hip Take Four Bistro. This may seem an unlikely manifesto from the people responsible for promoting breakbeat stalwarts like DJ food, Hexstatic and Funki Porcini.
What it reflects, however, is not so much a rejection of butt wiggling in favour of head scratching, as a desire to do both at the same time. Much like rubbing your head and patting your stomach, this can be rather difficult to pull off – as anyone who has ever tried to dance to Coldcut will tell you.
Difficult, but not impossible. Indeed, as the trail of gorgeous young things following the fractured basslines to Durban’s Red Eye art parties attests, it can pay spectacular dividends. A new audience is exposed to contemporary art and performance, a breathing space is created for more risky aesthetics and a leg-shaking, head-scratching good time is had by all.
No doubt it is this audience, the Shopping and Fucking demographic, that “facilitators” Shirley Kirchmann and the POP Bureau hoped to bring to SEXsmorgasbord. The programme featured DJs well known from Take Four’s excellent Pickle parties, paintings by Dominique Thoenes and Marc Standing, five theatrical performances and an appearance by the Brendan Jury/Warrick Sony collaboration, Trans Sky.
The venue is ideal for this sort of effort. It opens on to the sound stages of Longkloof Studios which have slick, sneaker-friendly dancefloors and, more importantly, allow a number of things to go on simultaneously. Early in the evening patrons had the option of blunted grooves in the bar area or banging kwaito on the main dance floor (yes, even in Cape Town white kids are starting to listen to kwaito). Later on, one imagined, it might become difficult to choose. Sadly, this was not to prove a problem.
The first item on the bill, was Well of Horniness, a sophomoric little bit about a college sorority that is in fact a “sisterhood of sin”. It struggled, both in conception and execution, to reach the level of a high school skit.
Next up was a spoken-word piece entitled Utterance. According to the programme, its performer, Thain Torres (can that really be his name?), wrote it himself. “These days,” the rather promising notes added, “I’m not quite sure where the typewriter ends and my body begins.” Unfortunately, however, Torres felt it necessary to take his shirt off in order to make the point. This was not pleasant to watch, and, having been forced to endure his chants of “hoc est signum corpus meum” as well, I feel compelled to suggest that Diamanda Galas albums should in future be marked in large red letters with the warning: “not to be mixed with excessive adolescence”.
Incompetence and indulgence set the tone for much of what followed (although it would be unfair to extend this assessment to the paintings, which were barely visible in the dim light). When Trans Sky finally took the stage to wrest the evening from “art” and return it to dance, the relief was immense.
Given that Warrick Sony currently has a brilliant sound installation, A Good Many Hours, playing at a serious exhibition (Bringing Up Baby, at the Castle), this turn of events was more than a little ironic. What it does indicate, however, is that scratching your head and shaking your butt simultaneously can be successful, you just have to get the rhythm right.