Alex Sudheim
James Joyce had Ulysses wander the streets of Dublin in his majestic novel; William Kentridge took Faustus to Africa for the re-invention of conventional theatre and Akiro Kurosawa despatched King Lear to medieval Japan for the epic film Ran.
So the concept of placing an antediluvian character in a contemporary context is not a radically new one. Yet it remains an eternally fascinating idea, a sure-fire device to cast fresh light upon the nature and character of present- day existence.
This is precisely what Jay Pather strives for in A South African Siddhartha, his complex and ambitious updating of the Buddha legend. Danced by the Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre, Pather’s work imports Siddhartha from the valleys of ancient India to the streets of modern South Africa.
As with projects of great scope and vision, Siddhartha’s success lies in the making of something contradictory, whose struggle for perfection is itself a crucial aspect of the work’s central principle.
For Siddhartha is indeed a man tormented by the need to attain ultimate spiritual flawlessness. He embarks upon the rigorous journey toward nirvana, which, despite his devoted efforts – and unlike the “original” Siddhartha – only ends in failure. As Pather says of his Siddhartha, “he is the quintessential existential anti-hero”. This mood is superbly captured by Thulebona Mzizi, who dances Siddhartha with the constant air of anguish and despair befitting the mystic’s thwarted visionary quest.
The multi-cultural ethos is in full force from the outset as we meet the young Siddhartha. Instead of an Indian born into the warrior-caste in 563 BC, he is a black boy born on a farm in contemporary South Africa whose mother is a sangoma and whose father a Brahman Priest. Vasudeva, his spiritual guide, is a taxi-driver.
As the parents dance their frustration at the boy’s wish to leave and wander through the world, the combined sound of the shells on the sangoma’s ankles and the bells on the priest’s amount to a subtle subversion of doctrinaire visions of cultural purity.
Other instances of “synergy among disparate strands”, as Pather calls it, abound throughout the piece. Traditional Zulu and Xhosa dance fuses with bhangra and pantsula; classical Indian dance forms kathak, bharatha natyam and oddissi jostle with classical ballet and performance art.
Pather, however, insists he is not motivated by any sentimental concerns for cultural integration. “I don’t believe one must imbibe other cultures,” he says. “One needs only to acknowledge and understand them. In reality, dissonance and integration are simultaneous forces.”
This fix on reality allows A South African Siddhartha to maintain its fragile power rather than become a mere plea for integration. Through its evocative sets and understated-yet- intense performance, the work seems to bear out Hermann Hesse’s idea, fundamental to this piece: “What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.”
Though the spoken interludes in Siddhartha teeter toward corny pop- spirituality, the overall bearing of the work is simple and elegaic: the unadorned tale of Everyman whose vainglorious quest for enlightenment must ultimately end in humility and resignation.
This is one of the work’s most interesting departures from the original Buddha legend, where Siddhartha does in fact find perfect beatitude. In South Africa, however, we do things differently, and Siddhartha is no exception. Once he has run the gamut of human experience from asceticism to hedonism, Siddhartha arrives at a simple and self-effacing conclusion. While climbing aboard a taxi in a dusty South African street, he diffidently remarks: “I have learned that we must love the world not as some misplaced magical vision of perfection, but as it is.”
A South African Siddhartha runs at the Playhouse Drama Theatre in Durban until March 19