Charl Blignaut
‘This is for you, Steven Cohen!” screamed a 16-year-old guitarist into the microphone as his band broke into a piece called Fight This Generation on the opening night of Durban’s biggest annual contemporary dance festival last week.
Though somewhat startling the genteel audience at the Durban Playhouse, the tribute was just another salvo fired in what is fast becoming an all-out dance war between Cohen, an award-winning performance artist, activist and choreographer, and the organisers of South Africa’s premiere dance festivals, FNB Vita.
After raising eyebrows at First National Bank’s (FNB) Johannesburg Dance Umbrella and then causing a furore at its Cape Town Dance Indaba, Cohen’s application to perform the same work on the Durban Dance Shongololo was rejected by the organisers.
Cohen accused FNB and Vita Promotions of ”good old-fashioned unconstitutional censorship”, saying in an open letter to the bank: ”FNB Vita should rather admit that their vigorous support of contemporary art in South Africa extends only so far as a corporate image can allow and no further.”
FNB Vita has vigorously denied Cohen’s charges, saying that his application to enter the festival was late. Cohen claims he never received the requisite forms from the organisers. More importantly, says the bank, it has ”the right as the sponsors and presenters of the festival to determine in consultation that some works are not suitable for their dance platforms. This in no way suggests censorship; it is merely choice .”
The dance festivals that use the slogan ”Provoke. Amaze. Amuse.” on their posters were certainly provoked and amazed after Cape Town audiences were exposed to Tradition, a haunting, scatalogical new work of Cohen’s performed in collaboration with his lover, the choreographer Elu.
FNB Vita say its decision not to select Cohen’s work for Durban was partly as a result of a slew of complaints received after Cohen and Elu’s Cape Town showing in July.
These included a petition signed by 49 members of a Cape Town ballet school, phone calls to the bank and the resignation of two of the Dance Indaba’s three judges. These were despite prominent warnings being displayed in the foyer and the programme.
In her letter of resignation to FNB Vita, one of the Cape Town judges describes Cohen’s work as ”filthy, debased pornography” that ”violated one’s dignity, and one’s personal morality and one’s feeling of well-being”.
Fellow former judge Eduard Greyling took his anti-Cohen campaign to the media, describing Cohen as ”pathogenic”. ”Half- naked men with sequenced [sic] see-through G-strings, a large dill-doll plugged up the anus to be pulled out on stage – Do you call this dance???????!!!!????” he asked in a letter to Vita.
He was reacting to a piece in which Cohen is suspended from the ceiling wearing Gemsbokhorn heels and then, as a clip from a porn video plays behind him, douches on Elu who is dancing below on point to Tradition from Fiddler on the Roof. For Cohen, the work deals with, among others, the physical body and with anal sex as ”a formerly heavily legislated aspect of life in South Africa”.
”We must be realistic about this,” said joint representatives of Vita and FNB, ”these complaints are not just from the bank’s customers, but also from fellow artists.”
The artists were chiefly a group of ballerinas appearing on either side of Tradition on the Cape Town programme, one of whom complained loudly after slipping on a stage which was not cleaned properly after Cohen’s piece.
In their petition, however, the ballet fraternity state that they do not wish to see Cohen removed from the festival, rather that FNB Vita programme their line-ups more cautiously and offer more explicit warnings to under-age audience members.
In Durban last week, however, Cohen, a former recipient of FNB Vita’s award for fine art, was something of a cause clbre.
On Friday night he appeared at the festival as Miss FNB Vita, with thick tape gagging his mouth.