Tapsula, a new Market Theatre production, puts pantsula dancers in tap shoes and transforms tap from a sleek dance form to a gyrating surge of force with furious arm swinging and determined stomping. Together they are like a herd of springboks in tap shoes — hit by a car, but still jumping.
The fine line between inventive fusion and wishy-washy attempts at merging opposite dance forms is increasingly jarring and predictable. Still it is an honour to be present at the creation of a sincere and imaginative new art form. Such is the case with Tapsula.
Half expecting a troupe of inexperienced dancers awkwardly trying to combine poorly choreographed ‘new territory”, to my surprise Tapsula works.
Choreographer Cinda Eatock of Melville’s Broadway Dance Project and director Josias Moleele take us through a fun but fierce collage of tap arrangements and body shaking.
Pantsula, a Zulu word meaning to waddle like a duck or to walk with protruded buttocks, developed as an artistic depiction of township life. The South African dance form evolved from the Americano township culture of the 1960s and was originally much more slick and showy than today’s incremental shakes and realignment of the thighs.
Members of the pantsula movement were known for their expensive taste in clothes and harsh township slang. They were easily distinguishable and targeted by apartheid police, particularly following the violence of the 1984 rent boycotts.
It became an underground dance of sorts, practiced secretly in shacks and common halls. After the regime fell, pantsula re-emerged in a more ‘respectable” commercialised style.
Township tap, on the other hand — once a foundation of Johannesburg street culture — has faded from glory since its heights in 1960’s Sophiatown.
Apart from the show itself, Tapsula is worth watching if only to witness once unspoken and underground dance forms turned into ‘marketable township dance”.
‘We’re trying to fuse the old and the new,” says Moleele. ‘We’re trying to demystify the image of pantsula as thugs.”
Mainstream Market Theatre audiences may have to part with their classical perceptions of tap as arrangements are passionately constructed and the piece nearly races itself.
The lead dancer begins a rhythm train in frenetic tap. A pantsula dancer creates similar movements and the theatre fills with sound. A delight of shrieks and whistles leaves one with a distinctive feeling of inner-ear damage.
The performers stop in unison and the silence creates a reflective respite before drum beats resume to enhance the sense of wild, swirling energy. I am left wound up, but too intimidated to jump up and gyrate.
Colourful aesthetics are employed with dancers wearing dark jeans, skin-tight pink T-shirts, plaid button-downs and Converse All-Star tap sneakers. Performers change shoes about five times during the performance.
Like most fusion the work is quite resourceful: three tappers, six pantsula dancers, three Tswana dancers as well as jembe drummers. The dancers are the apprentices of Mac Joe and Nathaniel Blangwe and it is easy to recognise the diverse styles of these inspired performers with their virtuosic movements that are clearly well practiced.
Their faces awash with feeling, the 16 men mediate complicated movements, emerging and disappearing like the men on street robots.
Seeking to narrate a meaning, there are frequent transitions into short storytelling scenes. Performers speak about learning to dance in the shacks of Randfontein and Soweto, describe the culture of township dance competitions and ‘mime-dance” through historical imagery of schooling and police repression of dance movements. Even a touch of satire is included.
That said, there aren’t many weighty ideas in this production and the drama can become a tad lengthy and unclear at times. The piece’s strength is more in its celebration of a blend of styles rather than social commentary.
In the future Moleele and Eatock hope to merge forms again with kwaito revolutions. For now the two have made a lovely first move towards a new phenomenon.