Robert Colman
Gregory Vuyani Maqoma is one of the young choreographers commissioned to do a piece for this year’s FNB Vita Dance Umbrella. I sat in on a rehearsal of his work, Rhythm Blues, at the Dance Factory. At first the dancers are self-conscious, pretending not to be, of the stranger in the rehearsal room. But they soon forget about me and get on with the job.
Maqoma takes Zakhele Nkosi through a solo. “Do you have a jersey to tie around your waist, something that wiggles?” he asks. The rehearsal room is soon filled with the energy of music and movement, and the concentration of Nkosi mirroring Maqoma’s steps. A combination of sensuous fluidity breaks into leaps and staccato contractions. If the finished product is anything like the short piece I watched, it promises to be transfixing and exciting.
Talking to the talented 27-year-old afterwards, it is clear that Maqoma is a choreographer to watch out for – an eloquent young man brimming with ideas and optimistic about the future of South African dance and culture.
He is inspired by the broad spectrum of the arts. “I don’t look at dance as separate from other art forms. My choreography always involves music, theatre, fashion, video, visual art and poetry.” His other source of ideas is the city. “Its vibrancy. And its ‘squareness’. The buildings, the streets, the thinking and the rules are all square. The city is also our playground. There is a constant exchange of energy. It is the city that makes me optimistic about South African culture. We are so fortunate to have such a diversity of cultures to draw on. Cultures to fuse.” This is integral to his style that he describes as a fusion of African and Western forms.
Rhythm Blues, featuring a live band and a DJ on stage, looks at the music and dance of the 1950s and 1960s. “I’m looking at how the past has influenced the present. We live in a society of sampling. Today music, dance and fashion are all sampled, but are still influenced by that generation.”
Maqoma has come a long way since he started dancing in 1987, doing “street dance”, a combination of township dance forms which were mostly American influenced. “We’d see stuff on TV, music videos, Michael Jackson, that sort of thing, and imitate it with a township flavour.” His multi-skills training, including dance, choreography and teaching, at Moving into Dance led to a one-year stint at the Brussels-based Performing Arts Research and Teaching Studios (Parts).
Completing a circle, he has been invited to take Rhythm Blues to a festival at Parts after the Dance Umbrella. While studying in Brussels he choreographed Rhythm 1,2,3, which premiered in Amsterdam. “Rhythm Blues is the baby of Rhythm 1, 2, 3.”
Despite attractive offers from out of the country we’re not going to lose this talented young artist. He still wants to work here and to contribute to the development of dance in this country. He has established the Vuyani Dance Project to do just that; to develop and take dance into the community with the aim of attracting audiences in their fullest diversity.
He hopes that Rhythm Blues will take his audience on a journey. “Like watching a movie slowly unfold. I also want the audience to create their own story. And I aim to entertain, inform and move them. My work is like poetry. I want to fill my audience and want them to fill me. It’s a two-way thing.”
Rhythm Blues will be performed at the Dance Factory on March 14 and 16 by Gregory Vuyani Maqoma, Zakhele Nkosi, Portia Mashigo and Shanell Winlock