Alex Sudheim
preview OFTHEWEEK ‘The kids of today should defend themselves against the Seventies it’s not reality, just someone else’s sentimentality,” intoned an earnest Eddie Vedder a few years back.
If by ”the kids of today” the Pearl Jam frontman meant the young members of Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre, they’re defending themselves pretty well, albeit in a somewhat peculiar manner.
The highly regarded Durban-based dance company, seen by many as one of the leading lights in the South African contemporary dance scene, has wandered into intriguing territory indeed with its idiosyncratic new production simply entitled NeWorks.
More accustomed to works of an epic nature performed in imposing auditoria one of their most recent successes was A South African Siddhartha performed in The Playhouse Drama for NeWorks Siwela Sonke have distilled themselves into a bare-boned leanness that cuts theatrical frills in favour of visceral intensity. On the sparse, tiny stage in the charged intimacy of the University of Natal/Durban’s Square Space Theatre, the six members of Siwela Sonke perform an interlocking series of solos and duets set to Roger Waters’s The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking.
At first the choice of music seems incongruous what on Earth is supposedly cutting-edge contemporary dance in this country doing occupying its time with pompous, grandiloquent, self-indulgent Seventies American progressive rock? The short answer is ”functional necessity”.
Siwela Sonke director/choreographer Jay Pather explains his interest in working on the ”line where pure movement and narrative meet” and how he needed a piece of music that could be a grid upon which solos and duets could flow together and form a coherent whole that would be more than a sum of its parts.
Certainly, from this point of view, the music is compatible Waters’s album is an extended account of a wild ride through the sexual revolution in the 1970s United States incorporating sex, drugs, self-discovery and sinister undertones of obsession and death. It wallows in histrionics and hyperbole in such non-deprecating fashion as to almost be a parody of itself, yet at times it hits some dark and ominous notes that save it from breaking through the ice of preposterousness that it skates so thinly upon.
It is mostly because of, rather than despite, the apparently apocryphal connection between the dance and the music that NeWorks works so surprisingly well. Each dancer was responsible for a portion of the piece’s choreography and Pather speaks of their ”generosity” toward the music in their individual interpretations. Despite The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking’s potential reading as one long, anachronistic melodrama, Pather and his dancer/choreographers have forged a physical dimension to the music that acts as a perfect foil.
Constantly attempting to understand the relationship between the movement and the music is what makes the piece so curiously compelling the dance never merely mimics the linear storyline of the music, but responds to it in ways that gives it a meaning it probably never even knew it had. Much in the same way that The Revolting Cocks’s cover of Rod Stewart’s Do You Think I’m Sexy? mined the obliviously dark heart of that callow pop ditty, Siwela Sonke have plundered the inner organs of Waters’s dreaded ”concept album” and have used it to construct a body of grotesque new beauty.
NeWorks runs at The Square Space Theatre, University of Natal/Durban, until April 25