Choreographers seem determined to break out of the confines of their medium. With each pasing year the FNB Dance Umbrella advertises more and more of its programme away from sanctioned theatre spaces.
Last year we witnessed Durban’s Jay Pather and Siwela Sonke Dance Company take to two shopping malls and a hotel room in Cityscapes. The rambling work attempted to disorientate audiences and played havoc with our preconceived notions of what makes up our urban comfort zones. This year Rodney Place and Ntsikelelo Boyzie Cekwana team up to create Infections of the Void: City Without Walls — Shopping Baroque. This piece with its impossible title takes place in the heart of the plush northern suburbs in the backyard of Gallery Momo.
While a gallery space is not entirely far from the madding art crowd, the locale of Momo has given Place and Cekwana fertile ground to comment on suburbia, using an alarm system set off by beams linked to recordings of incidental sound effects.
Originally performed in Austria and Poland, the press release for the event is somewhat drowning in ‘artspeak” and claims that the work ‘bridges between two post-territories — post-apartheid South Africa and post-communist central Europe.
‘It explores, through two dis- tinct but related photo/video/per- formance/sound/fashion works, the connections (and disconnections) between the security of a territory and the informing images of that territory — its habits and ideals, virtual and real bodies, video and live sequences and remixed and live sounds.”
The manifesto continues to describe the local segment of the work that ‘focuses on suburbia, its leisure and work habits, and the images that continue to shape it”.
It is down to the enigmatic Cekwana to present all these layers of meaning in movement, alone, in a garden. Skeptics would do good to bear in mind that Place has a proven track record. Certainly his 1998 work, Couch Dancing, that featured Robyn Orlin’s prima ballerina Nelisiwe Xaba writhing about on a reconstruction of Sigmund Freud’s couch was witty, intriguing and its complexities were not beyond grasp.
Orlin, who needs no introduction here, is the second choreographer to present work in a non-theatre space. In this instance she presents The Babysitting Series at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. The work was initiated in Berlin in 2002 using guards from Der Alten Nasionalgalerie. The title seems to derive from the fact that the performance is presented in the form of a galley tour, and so the audience is ushered or, rather, mollycoddled while they negotiate the gallery space.
As with much of Orlin’s work, things go desperately wrong when her cast members — parading as tourists — make some attempt to bridge the gap between high art and contemporary reality.
The Dance Umbrella’s third foray into real spaces is Sue-Pam Grant’s Screen Factor 8, which features Orlin favourite Gerard Bester with members of the Moving into Dance Mophatong Company. It takes place in shopper’s paradise — namely Sandton Square.
One has fond memories of a previous occasion — during last year’s Arts Alive International Festival — when the square was ambushed by crowds of pantsula dancers for a township dance drama, the biggest gathering of its kind yet to have taken place.
Of course there was a certain danger attached to the arrival of hundreds of black youngsters decked out in the kind of garb usually associated with gangsterism.
The fact remains, though, that this year’s forays into so-called real spaces in Johannesburg are really quite safe. Until choreographers remove their works from sanctioned, heavily guarded and monitored spaces, those products cannot be taken as boundary-breaking in the least.
Back to the Wits Theatre, where much of the Dance Umbrella programme takes place. Here the month-long celebration kicks off in earnest on Saturday with the first of two Stepping Stones programmes. This is the platform for hopefuls, some of whom we will no doubt hear from in the future. The programmes run on February 21 and 22, beginning at 9.30am. Braamfontein is somewhat void of good restaurants these days — so take lunch.
On February 25 and 26 the Wits Theatre hosts works by Gladys Agulhas and Cekwana. Agulhas’s Between Our Worlds Part 2: Portraits looks at the life cycle of the dancer. In a stroke of genius, she has each of her cast members playing a dancer at a different stage of their careers.
Although there are new values seeping into the dance world, it is comforting that certain choreographers are still preoccupied with old-fashioned things like drama and plot.
For programme updates call Tel: 482 4140 /082 570 3083 or go to www.artslink.co.za/arts