Review of the week:Phillip Kakaza
The Market Theatre’s new musical, Bozzoli … like Pantsula … like Mshoza, makes some essential observations about how dance culture has provided an antidote to misery in bad times.
Conceived and directed by Thulani Nyembe, for last year’s Barney Simon Young Directors Festival, it was acclaimed as the hit of the event. This week, after a reworking, it opens at the complex’s Laager Theatre to enjoy a full run
Set in the 1980s, Bozzoli explores the urban dance movement that cut a clear line from marabi in the 1950s to the pantsula dances of the 1980s, culminating in the kwaito dance fusion of today. The difference between Bozzoli and great musicals like Sarafina and King Kong lies in the history of popular dance culture itself. The dances in the play have evolved in the same manner as they would on the street corners.
Improvised in the sweat of the rehearsal room, Bozzoli tells its story through collectively choreographed dances that complement its sparse dialogue. The play’s energy is centred on the cycles of youth revolt. While it celebrates township life, it shows how young people have responded to the past political horrors with a spirit of abandonment.
With kwaito’s rise in popularity, Nyembe started researching the story in 1993. The initial motive was to look at how society’s subcultures change with time.
The narrative takes into account the bad element that, in the mid-Eighties, claimed to be pantsulas and took advantage of the school uprisings to commit crimes.
Thus, pantsula culture got its bad reputation. Nice people didn’t associate themselves with isipantsula, and their image – high-waisted Brentwood trousers, All Star takkies and Dobbs hats – came to signify danger.
Between the pantsulas of the 1980s and the kwaito kids of the 1990s was the era of the toyi-toyi. The play skips this political aspect of dance history, diving right into the present day.
In the early 1990s kwaito emerged to bring back a culture of dance for dance’s sake. It’s a form that has been influenced by lifestyles of the black Americans in pretty much the same way that local jazz took its cue from the African Americans of the 1950s. At the same time that the three-chorded marabi was evolving in Johannesburg’s slumyards, its eager South African audiences were dressing and dancing in a manner similar to their counterparts in the United States.
The play’s main character, Pantsu (Mokete Motseki), represents the violent side of the pantsula subculture. Together with his girlfriend Mshoza (Mmabatho Mogotsi), Pantsu lives a reckless life. He and his gang invade shebeens, showing off their smart outfits, wreaking havoc, abusing women and their male partners.
Mshoza, a female pantsula, has learnt to live a dangerous life. To survive, she goes out on shoplifting sprees, returning to the shebeen with an assortment of outfits hidden under her plaid dress. Mshoza’s shoplifting becomes a necessity to the pantsula womenfolk since, without their plaid dresses, Arrow shirts and two-tone shoes they would not have the female pantsula image.
The play juxtaposes two eras. In the second, the lives of kwaito kids are shown in stark reality – they sniff cocaine and seem to live a life of promiscuity.
The story is brillantly told through vibrant dance, with the help of an overhead projector, while voiceover relates the history of isipantsula. Bozzoli also uses appropriate music of township pop stars like Sipho “Hotstix” Mabuse, Boom Shaka and Brenda Fassie, all of whom were popular during the pantsula era.
The play’s strength lies in its celebration of people who have created unique dance forms, to relieve them from hardship.
Bozzoli … like Pantsula … like Mshoza is on at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg until January 22