Moving into Dance, now 20 years old, led the way to a truly South African dance style, writes Shaun de Waal
This week, with a series of performances at the Wits Theatre, Moving into Dance celebrates its 20th anniversary. Begun in the garage of choreographer Sylvia Glasser’s Victory Park home, with classes three nights a week and certainly no pay, the company has struggled and jived its way into the forefront of contemporary South African dance.
Today the company can show off a repertoire that ranges from the jazzy township vibes of Kofifi and Kwela to the stately orientalism of Hanano, from the Bushman-derived mysticism of Tranceformations to the pantsula modernism of Bongo Maffin.
Moving into Dance also plays a key educative role: more than 200 people have passed through its community training projects. Since 1992, a full- time teachers’ course has provided lessons in dance as well as history, anthropology, communication and administration. It moreover helps propel the process of aesthetic and social integration that is at the heart of the company’s project. At the Wits Theatre gala, some 65 new and old Moving into Dance members will gather to perform Tribute to Magogo, celebrating Glasser’s work over the last two decades.
Glasser pioneered what has come to be called Afrofusion, bringing together African and Western dance. She pursued this vision from the company’s very beginnings in 1978. Through her work and that of the company’s young choreographers and dancers, the Afrofusion idiom now pervades South African dance.
Glasser’s own interest in finding a fresh dance language worked its way though works such as Rain Dance and There’s a Dream Dreaming Us, the latter based on Bushman folklore, to issue finally in her 1991 opus, Tranceformations, which will be performed anew at the 20th-birthday celebrations.
In 1987 Glasser went back to university for three years to study social anthropology. In the work of scholars such as David Lewis-Williams, who first suggested the interconnection of trance states and rock art, Glasser began to find the threads she would tie together in Tranceformations.
The piece certainly brings new elements to contemporary dance, with postures and movements based on figures in rock art and anthropological observation. The dance’s slow, stomping introduction hints at the many hours such rituals would consume in real Bushman life. The celebrants shudder on the ground as they enter the trance state, and visions of magical animals weave before their eyes.
“I’m trying to show what the shamans did and what they saw,” says Glasser, “to show their hallucinations, and to let you see what they felt.”
And it’s not hard to see why trance and dance go together, and thus how imagination and dream can be bodied forth in symbolic, stylised gestures. In the trance state, the shamans feel themselves to be drowning or flying as they call for power, for rain, for success in hunting, or for healing. In dance, the body is required to speak, to be many different things, a form constantly changing.
That notion is rivetingly embodied in Vincent Mantsoe, perhaps Moving into Dance’s brightest star. The 1991 Tranceformations was his first professional dance performance; now he travels the globe as the fted guest of festivals and foundations. His choreography takes Glasser’s Afrofusion to the next level, incorporating not just African and European but also Asian elements to create a highly individual, accessible and exquisitely beautiful style, whether he’s impersonating a bird in Gula Matari or taking a snapshot of his parents in Phokwane (a new piece getting its South African premire at the Wits Theatre).
Mantsoe is spending more and more time overseas, an unfortunate result of the paucity of funding available for dance in South Africa. “We went around to raise money for Vincent’s salary but we couldn’t,” says Glasser sadly.
In fact, not one of the company’s eight principal dancers is salaried as a member of the company. What they earn comes from teaching in the training programme, which is sponsored by South African corporations and foreign embassies. And while individual works have been commissioned and some travel subsidised, the company itself has not received any direct funding at any time in its 20-year history.
Everyone doubles up, says Glasser: dancers do a bit of publicity, administrator Susan Graham helps with lighting or with costumes. When the company is touring – and it is increasingly in demand at foreign festivals – there is no one left to answer the phone in the Johannesburg office.
The city council has at least provided a physical home for Moving into Dance in the Newtown cultural complex, but the rest is left to the company to provide – somehow. Looking back, Glasser says, “People ask me how do I feel after 20 years. I love the work, and I get immense satisfaction from the work, seeing how people have grown from the teaching project into management positions, and so on, but I fear for the future. One can’t go from year to year and just not know what, after six months, is going to be funded.”
Odd for a company two decades old and acknowledged as a leading player in South African dance – a company that has travelled to Portugal, France, Holland, Israel (where it had an audience of 15 000), and eight African countries. The temptation for talented dancers and choreographers to take up positions offered overseas can be very strong. “I really do fear we’re going to lose this whole generation,” says Glasser.
As for the next two decades, it’s hard to see even one year into the future. As Glasser says, “We don’t know if we’re going to be here.” Bear in mind, however, the grit and vision that got Moving into Dance this far.
Moving into Dance performs at the Wits Theatre, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, from October 22 to 25.