sceptic’s eyes
Brenda Atkinson
`I do make life difficult for myself,” sighs Robyn Orlin, eyelids drooping to prove a point, her voice suggesting fatigue and inescapable hardship.
Orlin is musing on her latest performance piece, commissioned by the FNB-Vita Dance Umbrella and due for launch this weekend. With just a week of rehearsals to go, the dancer who’s foresworn dancing wonders why she chose to make an hour-long piece in the Wits Underground Theatre, rather than a 20- minute main-theatre show like all the others.
When I creep into the atmospheric basement during rehearsal, actor Gerard Bester is standing in his underpants shouting instructions at the cast and at an invisible audience: “Audience please stand, that’s right, now just raise your arms, and breathe, yes, just keep breathing. Nellie, please get into position, God this set is a mess, I just don’t know what Robin thinks she’s doing. Alright audience, you can sit down now …”.
Bester’s improvised tirade is a hysterically rendered spoof on Orlin the choreographer and director: Orlin explores ventriloquism as a strategy for taking the piss out of herself. It’s wonderful. Bester is wonderful. Orlin is hitting the perfect pitch.
Orlin has been making life difficult for herself for some time now, not least because of her subversive, deconstructive takes on local art, theatre and dance elites and their respective modes of bourgeois propriety. The result has been a bouquet of local and international accolades and an entrenched status as the grande dame of the Dance Umbrella.
There have also, of course, been lashings of criticism from her peers for her “self- indulgent” representations of the artist as bastard child of South African culture.
Following the bewilderment and undisguised hostility elicited by My Hiccups Continue to Growl …, her controversial Johannesburg Biennale opener in 1997, Orlin has shifted her investment away from dance and into choreography and producing.
“I don’t think South African audiences understood what I was doing with Hiccups,” she says. “They were waiting for me to dance, and became annoyed when I didn’t.” Then she emits a growling laugh, “I thought it was very funny to lie on a blanket and eat spinach and tell everybody not to feed the artist! But apparently I was wrong.”
Perhaps, I suggest, local artists found it unfunny because the message of the piece had hit a painful nerve: most South African artists would agree that they get the raw end of the veg, but few would set themselves up as abject animals, swiping wildly at institutional politics and refusing, metaphorically, to “dance” like a trained monkey for little appreciation and even less money.
“That’s possible,” Orlin concedes. “But I’m used to being slagged off and then hailed as a genius two years later, which in itself is bullshit anyway because there are many other performers to focus on. It just seems to me that people hold on to certain value systems that I continuously break. Then it’s like I have to die – or kill myself – before what I’ve just done is recognised.”
Although, at a scandalously young-looking 43, Orlin claims not to miss dancing herself, she admits to being “somewhat suspended” in her latest work, which is driven by “disillusionment with the body”.
It’s a depressing confession to hear from a classically trained dancer, but Orlin’s disillusionment frees her to look at both bodies and dance from a sceptic’s perspective. It gives audiences the chance to watch what happens when the aesthetic of classical dance emerges from Orlin’s alchemy into sublime anti-aesthetic.
“It’s not that I don’t like ballet,” explains Orlin, “it’s just that I’m very aware of it as a form that has a politically loaded history in South Africa: we have to interrogate its cultural meaning without necessarily being politically correct about it.” Of the six-strong cast for this year’s Umbrella piece – titled Daddy I’ve Seen This Piece Six Times Before and I Still Don’t Know Why They’re Hurting Each Other – only half are dancers.
And while this obviously limits physical capability in some ways, it brings a shining talent to the performance and dramatic aspects of the work.
“Daddy,” Orlin explains, “is about love – whatever that is – and it’s about a group of people who just can’t get a show together, no matter how hard they try. It’s asking: whose aesthetics belong where, truly? It’s questioning dance forms, and the Umbrella itself, and of course a range of local political issues.”
There will, undoubtedly, be those who find fault with Orlin’s most recent, post-modern, free-associating piece. But in its interactive, highly mobile presentation, there is a light touch that softens the bite of the satire, the pain of the lover, the disillusionment of the producer. There is darkness, but there is none of the raw self- flagellation of Orlin’s watershed Biennale piece.
Part of the magic of all art is finding what you want to find in the gaps that it leaves for your imagination. It is for this reason that art, in most of its forms, is both appreciated and dismissed, and Orlin has always pushed these gaps to the limit. As she puts it, “I feel it’s important not to always have to explain why you’re making art; sometimes you just want to create, and play. Sometimes you want to feel that you’re not submitting a grant proposal.”
Daddy will be performed as part of the FNB Vita Dance Umbrella on Saturday March 13 at 7pm and Sunday March 14 at 6pm. A discussion – Face to Face with Choreography – will follow the performance on Sunday night. People who attend both the performance and the discussion will pay only one entry fee.