Alex Dodd
Halfway up the main staircase of the Albany Museum, stuck to a bright red wall are the following words: “The universe is not to be narrowed down to the limits of the understanding which has been man’s practice up to now, but the understanding must be stretched and enlarged to take in the universe as it is discovered.” Although he might never have heard of this strange little cauldron of a town, Francis Bacon could well have been describing the impetus that fuels the most challenging work at Grahamstown this year.
By far the most raved about productions this warm winter have been those that dance and dabble in imaginal worlds: the theatre of the subconscious. There is always one production that haunts. Even as the plane alights from the runway at Port Elizabeth airport, its startling images and new sense refuse to be assigned to the storehold of cumulative memory.
Last year the production was Elizabeth – its creator Denise Stoklos, the turbo- charged Brazilian storyteller who is capable of turning herself into a mad queen one moment and a prehistoric bird the next.
This year the production that has left audiences feeling like awed children is undoubtedly Dedale. French choreographer and theatre wizard Philippe Genty’s production is like a 3-D moving painting by Rene Magritte. Reminiscent of nonsense poems by Edward Lear, this mind game of a play subverts the conscious, daytime world as we know it and enters the territory of dreaming.
Nothing can be taken for granted: not scale, not gravity, not morality. The actors create a world in which people eat their lovers’ faces and women feed pieces of their sliced up breasts to hungry fishes in a wavy sea.
Possibly one of the most intriguing things about this journey into the world of a mind undisciplined, is the very rigour and discipline that must go into making such chaos believable. The special effects in Dedale are to theatre what The Matrix is to cinema. When a city at night turns into the sea and then the entire sea disappears within seconds to become a flat stage you find yourself wandering how that sea was supported. These scientists of make believe could rob your entire house while you were watching Supersport.
Artistically South Africans are often like bold and untamed teenagers. Here artists are more often than not brave and pioneering, but alternative work often lacks polish. The practice, endurance and adherence to rules that lends a weightiness to much European art is something that comes out of an ancient society where art is as much of a discipline as science. This reality is burningly tangible in Dedale. The polish and perfection, the split-second timing and the seamlessness of illusions all lend magic to the play.
This frivolity and delight was severely lacking in Chris Pretorius’s Dark Continent, a grim journey along a dark river with a man losing his mind. “I think the fear of drifting into darkness, chaos, irrational terror, regressing into a state of the unsubdued preconscious, is still very much with us today,” says Pretorius. It is possibly this issue of fear that differentiates Pretorius’s work from Genty’s. Dark Continent is all about the protagonist’s fear of loss: losing the rules of the continent from which he believes he originates, as he enters the murkier territory of the unknown. It is the protagonist’s fear of the darkness that is his own undoing.
Genty’s cast on the other hand is past caring – beyond redemption. They’ve willingly relented to the dark continent of the mind and bask in its lack of conscious rules and regulations. The future is as much of an illusion as gravity or love in Dedale and therefore there is nothing to fear.
Another production that exposes the lie in the hegemony of consciousness is Theatre Goose on a String’s production of Bertold Brecht’s The Wedding. In this production the cast employs the vessel of marriage to rip into broader societal disease. Whereas with Genty and Pretorius the battle between order and chaos, consciousness and subconsciousness is an interpersonal one, with Brecht this battle takes on a more political dimension with biting parody.
The Wedding is a party gone wrong, a celebration of an institution that is as inadequate and defunct as the rickety furniture in the newlyweds’ home. The bride and groom aren’t interested in taking the first dance together. The married couples can’t stand each other. The husbands are lecherous and the wives are as horny as hell. Infidelity is rife and innocence is a lie. The young virgin in white is actually pregnant and the menopausal matron is butch. The young guitar-playing stud wants to screw the bride. The catering is inadequate.
This production that hails from the Czech Republic was not to everybody’s taste. Lots of people stomped out, their sensibilities offended by the self-consciously schlocky gypsy circus aesthetic. Personally I was totally seduced by the whole D-grade carry- on which reminded me of Emir Kusturica’s brilliantly satirical Underground.
What all these productions shared was a splendidly affecting aesthetic. In Dark Continent it is the colonial classicism of the fez, the cream linen suits and the leather-bound notebook. Pretorius’s surreal, Dali-does-Dakar backdrops are a superbly shocking counterpoint to the archetypal, classical set and costumes which inure one into believing that some things are normal and certain things can be taken for granted.
This same counterpointing technique – classicism versus surrealism – is employed in the design of Dedale and The Wedding. Umbrellas, pinstripe suits, aprons, top hats and spectacles vie with fishes, sequins, morphing dough, lethal blades and visible underwear – the iconography of opposing universes.
The visuals superbly bring to life art that asks questions like: “Have you ever met a conscious egg?” and makes assertions that, “Everything is terribly funny. Everything collapses.” Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon Grahamstown and Grahamstown eats it up.