DANCE
Guy Willoughby
Cape Town’s annual contemporary dance festival, the FNB Vita Indaba, held over four chock-a-block days at the Artscape Theatre, offered riveting work, including major new ensemble pieces by Tossie van Tonder, Christopher Kindo and Vincent Mantsoe, among others
Standards were uneven the selection process needs to be re-examined closely but in general what excited patrons was the sense that we were witnessing a distinct Southern African dance vocabulary taking shape, and the dynamic rapport between established choreographers and young dancers. Out of this, great dances (and dancers) will spring and are doing so already.
From Johannesburg, one of the companies that impressed was the Vuyani Dance Theatre Project, featuring Gregory Vuyani Maqoma in Moving Cities one man’s edgy tour through an urban soundscape. Maqoma is a wonderfully nuanced dancer, and the wit and grace he brought to Ami Shulman’s restless choreography was a crowd-pleasing delight though one routine too long.
Maqoma himself choreographed Southern Comfort for the company: this was a frisky interplay between himself and dancer Shanell Winlock that explored the shifting power-play between two people locked in attraction.
The La Rosa Spanish Dance Company, choreographed by Carolina Rosa, demonstrated how the breathless rhythms of this dance genre can be adapted to searching purposes, always barely containing sexual energy with their stylish evocation of a man swimming in a seethingly female ocean (El Mar The Sea).
Sylvia Glasser co-created a delightful, surprising series of interactions spats might be better? as two dancers (Constance Kau and Nhlanhla Mahlangu) prepare for a performance indefinitely delayed.
Christopher Kindo’s dance company mounted, by contrast, a harrowing, entirely absorbing new work called Black Tide, composed in memory of his niece, brutally murdered by intruders some years ago.
The unpalatable reality of senseless violence in South Africa is rendered in sweeping, inexorable images by four dancers, with Ina Fortune the helpless though resistant object of a harsh communal male gaze. Black Tide proved, irresistibly, that dance both evokes and staunches the most ruinous emotions.
Vincent Mantsoe presented two expressively physical meditations on movement, space and the body in Speaking with Tongues & Ngoma and Sunduza. Among the imaginative offerings of Cape Town’s Jazzart Dance Theatre, the passion and intensity in the grand finale on Saturday, Untitled a collaboration of dance companies Jazzart and Moving into Dance proved that combining Capetonian whimsy and Gautengian passion makes for explosive results (artistic director: the protean Alfred Hinkel).
My only regret was that I missed the return to the stage after 13 years of Tossie van Tonder: by all accounts her dance was a disturbing, powerful work of self-scrutiny. For all of these essays into physical and imaginative forms, Capetonians owe our hard-working dance community a vote of exhausted, exhaustive thanks.