Guy Willoughby
theatre
Continuing the buoyant spirit of the festive season, the Cape revels in a new batch of intriguing new home-brewed shows that foster, in different forms, the unfolding cusp-millennial local genius.
Most curious is the odd congruence of two dance-theatre explorations, Tango del Fuego (just ended at the Oude Libertas, Stellenbosch) and Sex, Tango and Everything Else (Baxter Concert Hall).
Tango del Fuego is a multi-form meditation on Argentina’s most famous cultural export. “Guided” (programme note) by the redoubtable Marthinus Basson in collaboration with a seasoned cast, the show evokes, but in some way denies, its subject: the magical, hypnotic dance that grew out of slave dispossession and white overlordship, machismo swagger and women’s yearning. While Basson attempts to weave a stage tapestry of disparate elements, the various elements pull in different directions, at once too opaque and too cluttered to work as one. Tango del Fuego reminds one of Basson’s recent Breyten Breytenbach poetic-theatre epics, Boklied and Johnny Cockroach, but here without the rich controlling imagination of the poet.
The show comes alive when the (under-utilised) musicians and the coruscating dancer Mark Hoeben at last embrace, rather than perform, the tango but we have to wait long stretches of time before we get to it. It will be interesting to see how the protean Basson develops this piece for the Oudtshoorn Festival next month.
Writer-singer Dawn Lindberg’s Sex, Tango and Everything Else purports to “combine the tango passion and style” with contemporary dance, “to depict the poweful emotion that Odette feels in telling the story of her love affair” (author’s programme note).
Unlike Basson’s multi-faceted enquiry, the deployment of the tango here feels like a rather cheap attempt to add tone to a tacky tale of adulterous suburban bliss. In the character of Odette the sort of self-obsessed hostess who gives Jo’burg’s northern suburbs a bad name Lindberg prowls the stage, occasionally singing rather badly and telling a story of sexual stolen adventure, while dancers Sena Bovim and Olga Nikitidis perform variations.
Oddly, the dancers are coy while Lindberg is mercilessly, alarmingly frank, in the dare/ bare-all style of Hustler or Penthouse. The show comes across as an odd post-menopausal fantasy, way too long, baldly lit and with its trail of cellist, classical guitarist and under-used dancers a massive dose of egotistical pretension. Does it speak to older women of their desires and offer a take on after all the day-dreaming lives of a cosseted belt of urban society that is part of our cultural mosaic? Jo’burgers may find out for themselves when the show moves next month to the Agfa Theatre on the Square. (At the Baxter Theatre until February 10.)
Another potentially rich strain of our cultural potjiekos was unlidded last week at the Coast Restaurant in Table View by media chef-raconteur Francois Ferreira, whose Food Cabaret sets out to celebrate a host of local food styles. The novelty is that, while Ferreira cheerily chats, you eat the food he’s talking about. If he comes across at present as a slightly manic kaftan-swathed South African Airways air steward declaiming the menu in first class, he has got hold of a splendid idea. (The show repeats on February 28 and March 7 before touring.)
Finally, most outstanding of last week’s avalanche of openings, Out of Bounds at the Baxter Theatre. Rajesh Gopie’s one-man recollection of a dirt-poor Indian upbringing triumphantly turns the local into a universally accessible theatrical experience. Directed with a supple hand by Tina Johnson and written by Gopie, this marvellously resonant and engaging show offers the familiar trope of a young man’s rites-of-passage with a seductive blend of humour and compassion. Gopie works the stage with inventiveness and versatility, evoking a veritable host of characters from his narrator’s 1980s childhood and youth. Stagecraft, sound and lighting combine with a luminous performance to pose teasing questions: is the narrator, subject of his own discourse, also the author who speaks? Does the young man’s determined flight from a hidebound Hindu society, blighted by apartheid’s racist demeaning of their humanity, make or break him? At play’s end, the hero’s dead father, despised for so long, intones: “I will return to you in dreams, and be with you always.”
In that Joyce-like oscillation of necessary flight and even more necessary return, individual exile and communal embrace, lies the nub of Gopie’s drama and the reason his work is so compelling for anyone trying to make sense of being alive in the unfolding drama that is South Africa now.