Catherine Knox at the Eastern Cape Dance Umdudo
The Eastern Cape has always been an incubator bed, a crucible. A place of fecundity and foment. Last week’s FNB Dance Umdudo – five days and nights of dance in Grahamstown – was a celebration of work in progress. An unadjudicated bricolage of bodies in movement – the eloquent, the anxious, the liberated, the lolloping – challenging mind and gut to make meaning.
This was the fourth in an annual happening which is the local equivalent to Durban’s Dance Songololo and Cape Town’s Dance Indaba – all three satellites of Gauteng’s Dance Umbrella. More than a five-night stand, it aims to stimulate dance activitites throughout the year.
This year again, a week-long choreographer’s development workshop was held at Rhodes before Easter for 10 dance leaders from far- flung corners of the province giving them the chance to dance, swap ideas and network. A full programme of offerings on the university stage each evening and a free fringe programme of traditional work at the Monument, catered to all comers. All, that is, who could afford transport and accommodation.
Audiences are always beefed up by excitable groupies who travel with their local dance troupe, making for wildly enthusiastic audience response. Running down the “opposition” is part of the fun. Angsty representations of violence and/or the erotic are met with hoots of laughter and cat calls. In response, self-styled purists hiss “Ssssh”.
After being exhorted by a polite voice on the PA to respect the work of others, the audience obediently imitates a dead bear right through Vuyo Booi’s raucous and witty gum-boot dance for the Sakhuluntu Cultural Group. It feels like watching a movie with the sound track turned off.
This is just one more flex in the limbering- up process that is the Umdudo: questioning old norms and relationships. Can we rethink what constitutes okay behaviour in a theatre? Should these different dance codes share a stage at all?
To make double sure excellence isn’t missing from the pot, the sponsors bring in a big star to round off the programme. This year it was Moeketsi Koena of Soweto Dance Theatre 1. His hypnotic, troubling display of untitled virtuosity continually renewed itself, even after five viewings in close succession.
The other most striking dancer was Helen Seaman, (who runs her own studio in Port Elizabeth). She was liquidly lyrical in Dune – a First Physical Theatre piece choreographed for and with her by Gary Gordon. In her own piece, Third Party, Theft and Fire, she rebooted herself as a forbidding Amazon.
The First Physical Theatre Company, in Dune and three other pieces, lived up to its reputation as thrilling (lots of physical risk), strong on ideas, new moves and musical discovery. Their arresting Membrane, a solo by Shane Manilal, was accompanied by classical music for strings and voices composed and conducted by second-year student Zingisani Mkefa.
Intellectually physical musings such as these were deliciously upstaged by Mziyanda Mancam’s Border Youth Dance Theatre who hit Umdudo like a meteor and had audiences howling with pleasure. Energy, polish, loads of detail, whacky humour and colour, colour, colour – they had the house levitating with their leaps.
Yet some of the oldest performers on the programme, in the form of the Mkhombeni Traditional Dancers, still managed to prove that solid professionalism and a lifetime of experience can give youth and verve a run for its money. These foot-stomping, ululating, drum-beating mamas combined narrative, deep orchestration, big sounds, mesmerising cross- rhythms, style, presence and authority.
The Umdudo programme demanded that audiences switch from this kind of experience straight into, say, a contemporary student invention. Much of the student work was white and stylised, sometimes terribly indulgent, often engaging with alienation, dissonance, gender and despair. Much of the work featuring black choreographers and dancers was joyful, amused, sometimes banal, relying more on keenly-observed anecdote than psychological symbolism, using ensembles more than individual dancers. Rhodes drama students overloaded the programme somewhat with eight pieces, breaking new ground, taking risks, groaning with hyperbolic iconography. And isn’t this what student work can be about?
The contradictions abound, but as long as the critics argue and the dancers dance, transformations like Border Youth’s will always be possible and the Umdudo will continue to be a space to watch.