Suzy Bell On show in Durban
When the entire Playhouse Dance Company was retrenched at the end of March this year, our Durban dancers were reeling with the rude shock. But instead of whingeing, Mark Hawkins, the ballsy former artistic director of the Playhouse Company, founded The Fantastic Flying Fish Dance Company, one of the first fully privatised dance companies in South Africa, which now employs eight full-time dancers.
Funded partly by the National Arts Council (NAC) they boldly launch their first season this weekend (September 10 to 12) with Triptych.
The show features three acclaimed choreographers – David Gouldie, Jeannette Ginslov and Mark Hawkins – each with a distinct and unique vision. Hawkins presents Emotional Landscapes, which he unabashedly admits: “makes no heavy statement. It’s one helluva relief to do an artistic piece that has no heavy socio-political message”.
But he does admit that in post- apartheid South Africa there is still a need for companies like Jay Pather’s Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre Company or a traditional ndhlamu dance company. “It’s just that we are so bombarded with politics I decided to do something where I’m not chasing after a new dance vocabulary, or a new dance style that is special to South Africa or rich in social commentary. Dance pieces can just be artistic dance pieces,” explains Hawkins.
His set design is by Barry Downard, a fine Durban photographer and photo- illustrator who created billboards for Highveld Stereo, with the acclaimed local advertising agency, Orange Juice Design. For Triptych, Downard, who says he’s into the collective consciousness of “cows and computers” walked through maize fields with his hand-held video camera to film movement and other interesting imagery. This will be back-projected onto a huge projection screen of white parachute material, while fragmented imagery will swim across the dancers bodies as front projection.
Hawkins chose Mosaic, a dynamic Durban band, to perform in Emotional Landscapes live on stage. They have performed at the Jazz Educators’ conference in Atlanta and recently at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Mosaic draw inspiration from the traditional musical genres surrounding us in KwaZulu-Natal, combining jazz, Indian classical, Western and African music, to create a fusion that is Indo-Afro Jazz and unmistakably Durban. In stark contrast, young up- and coming choreographer David Gouldie, who is known for his revolutionary approach to dance, has another local band – Scooters Union – on stage “creating circus sounds” with their unique blend of Britpop, rock and boere music.
Not content with straight contemporary dance, Gouldie has choreographed Unfinished (r)evolution as a fusion of physical theatre and neo-classical dance techniques.
He is set to deconstruct the dance floor by painting a new dance vocabulary with a dysfunctional dance piece that Gouldie says smacks of that quick-fix, fractured generation of ours.
“We live in such a splintered society – we’re more into channel-hopping desires than a straight linear pool of thought. My piece is multi-narrative. It’s essentially my ideology at the dawn of my millennium, kinda negative, but perhaps with a positive outcome. It has a circus theme too . you know, that light childhood mood at the funfair? Well here it’s revisited through dance.”
Acclaimed choreographer Jeannette Ginslov will present Killing Time, which she says is a “multimedia, interdisciplinary, intertextual, theatrical experience”. Ginslov has collaborated with the awesome band TransSky.
The Fantastic Flying Fish Dance Company present Triptych at the Playhouse Opera in Durban from September 10 to 12. Friday and Saturday at 6pm and 9pm. Ticket prices: R45 and R35. Dial-A-Seat on (031) 369-9444 for credit card bookings