Maverick dancer Tossie van Tonder and four young Jazzart graduates have collaborated to bring a wealth of diverse experience to this year’s Dance Indaba in Cape Town
Guy Willoughby
One of the more watchable events on the upcoming FNB Vita Dance Indaba programme will be the explosive interaction of maverick dancer Tossie van Tonder and four young Jazzart township graduates if there is anything to watch at all on the night, that is. The excitement, when I intercept Van Tonder and her collaborators during rehearsals, lay in the open endedness.
”I’m not sure if I’m ready to put myself in front of an audience yet,” says Philani Mbana (23), a young dancer-choreographer who brings to Van Tonder’s new work all the the energy and acumen of a rough-and-tumble life on society’s margins. ”Our work with Tossie has taken us into a level of improvisation where you cannot lie. It’s been frightening going to such a place!”
Van Tonder, whose raw power and boundary-stretching solo work in the Eighties marked an epoch in local dance, attests to the excitement and recognition she felt upon encountering Mbana and his fellow students’ improvisatory work earlier this year. ”I’d waited 13 years to find other dancers interested in working at this level,” she says. ”I’d danced alone because there was no one else. When I saw these dancers, I thought, ‘My God! There are people working like this! What a relief!”’
What Van Tonder saw was a level of technical proficiency and emotional openness, honed by choeographer-teacher Alfred Hinkel, which tuned in with a long-time project that reaches fruition at this year’s Indaba.
”It is difficult to describe the project the process has been open-ended and involves a totality of involvement from each of us but I wanted to deal with the Third Worlding of the West, to allow us a voice the West really needs to hear. We began working against the background of the racism conference in Durban, and in a sense our work may be a metaphor for these conferences that try to make a difference to the world.”
Van Tonder’s partners bring a wealth of diverse experience to this collaboration: Mbana, whose dance Maikutlo (”Feelings”, in Sotho) also features on the Indaba programme, has packed much into a short life. Born and raised in Guguletu, he was an early devotee of Jazzart ”I enrolled with Alfred aged eight and I came to town every Saturday to learn” before succumbing to the dubious, racy temptations of township life in the molten early 1990s.
”At age 15 I had problems in my family my mother was struggling to support us and I wasn’t happy in school. Some friends urged me, ‘Let’s get money!’ I got involved in housebreaking and thus into the gangs … I was shot at, knifed … I got caught and spent four weeks in Pollsmoor prison. Never again. I went to the Transkei to finish my schooling and afterwards I phoned Alfred. He said, ‘Come in, let’s see what we can do!”’
Today Mbana affirms that his tumultuous history is the crucible of a passionate commitment to dance and its expressive possibilities: ”I’m proud to say I am a dancer. Dance is free; through it I try to show what I have experienced. I want to get to pass on to other kids these skills, to give them the opportunity also to dream.”
It is this intense engagement that Van Tonder a white Afrikaner and a woman who has made her own demanding journey to being, as she calls it, ”ethnically cleansed” has drawn on in often painful search for new dance forms and energies. ”All our inner resources dreams, inner histories, dj vu are engaged. We are seeking to merge knowledges, turn them into movement, receive and exchange movement.”
Van Tonder and Mbana both attest to the powerful tutelary spirit of Hinkel, prime mover of Jazzart: ”Alfred has nurtured this work”, says Van Tonder. ”He has given these dancers freedom to move, to improvise, and we are sincerely grateful to him for trusting this exploration.”
A final word from Van Tonder, after we’ve discussed the Big Brother reality TV show and its aesthetic meaning: ”If there were cameras in our rehearsal room, they’d take viewers through an intense, healing transformation process. This is what we should be exporting: the real power and potential of South African dance!”
The details
The FNB Vita Dance Indaba 2001 takes place at the Artscape Theatre, Cape Town, from September 26 to 30. Book at Computicket, www. computicket.co.za or call Artscape Dial-a Seat on Tel: (021) 4217695.