When Jeanette Ginslov stepped on to the stage of the Dance Factory last weekend she dragged a platoon of real Stallion Security guards up with her. It was the day after Women’s Day and the last day of the Women’s Arts Festival. Ginslov was making a satirical statement about how she reacts to being at home alone.
At the climax of her piece called Wolf at the Door/Cry Wolf she snapped her fingers and the guards, wearing bright red overalls, marched in to join her in military formation. The title of the piece reflected on a woman’s ambivalence at having to call for help every time she hears a suspicious sound.
It was a crowd-pleaser for the festival audience and it signalled the end of a nine-part dance programme that included a power line-up of Gauteng talent.
There was also Safe Harbour by Gladys Agulhas, modelled around an uncredited documentary called Women and War. Like Ginslov’s, her piece also had a twist in the tail. At the end of Safe Harbour over a dozen audience members, mostly children, filed solemnly on stage and turned to the auditorium. It was a symbolic moment: potential victims of war staring at potential victims.
Dance is equipped to take on elements of conceptualism. By using non-performers and video art, local dance is making inroads into real life. It has something to do with the way contemporary South African choreographers construct their stories. Unlike actors, dancers don’t play characters. Rather, they make dynamic collages about relevant issues. Local dance, like other forms, is issue obsessed.
This weekend sees the launch of a new dance festival for Gauteng called, appropriately, New Dance. Its sparse but quality-driven programme includes a commissioned solo work by Gregory Maqoma, well-known for his special brand of camp. Maqoma’s upcoming piece is called Ketima and breaks with his previ- ous preoccupation. His new work presents the interior and exterior world of the child.
Maqoma has been ‘working on the idea of a baby — on the innocence of a child. The movements have been drawn from a playground, and the turmoil of emotions that any child goes through.”
Improvising to Air on a G String by Johan Sebastian Bach, Maqoma begins with simple child-like movements which he elevates to a sort of trance. The joy is lost as things become increasingly tense. ‘It’s a portrayal of childhood as a frightening experience,” he says. ‘As a human being you get to a point where you almost lose your innocence. Because you are so influenced by what is happening outside you begin to wish that you did not see what is happening in the world. You long to be a child who relies on natural instincts.”
Coincidentally, at the Women’s Arts Festival Nelisiwe Xaba — prima ballerina of the Robyn Orlin company — also performed a solo work in the role of a child. Called No Strings Attached 2, Xaba modelled her piece around the jumping games that township girls play with rubber bands. Xaba’s work reflected on ‘the fact that children don’t play today — they watch videos, they watch TV, they’re on the computer. But we used to create our own games.”
Xaba doesn’t think that access to technology, for the youth, necessarily makes for a better quality of life: ‘It makes for individuality. But socially kids get messed up, especially single- parent kids. They never get to play with other kids, except at school.”
A solo work of international stature that will also evoke the fantasy world of the child is the Finnish Cultural Foundation sponsored multimedia Keiju (meaning Fairy) performed and choreographed by Jyrki Karttunen. According to the programme notes: ‘An ambiguous character is catapulted into a timeless no-man’s land between the world of flowers and everyday reality without being able to hold on to either.”
Finally, the themes of childhood and loss of innocence come together in the revival of a collaboration between Moeketsi Koena and Malgache choreographer Gaby Saranouffi. This is the ground-breaking, French-funded Blame Me Blind that combines poetry, dance and video by Vincent Boloi.
To research Koena took himself off to rural Venda where he spent time at traditional circumcision schools. The resulting work, Koena says, ‘talks about the difference of being African and having to grow up in the Westernised world”.
Ultimately, for youth the conflict is worsened when they confront the reality of HIV/Aids. ‘We deal with the concept of shame, confrontation and disorder,” Koena says. ‘We use a corridor of light to show the path that everybody takes — you are born, you grow up and you die. But in this period of history, it doesn’t happen that way. You are born and you disappear.
‘It’s not about giving me a booklet and a condom and saying this is Aids awareness, and saying now go and have sex. Life is not an advert by LoveLife. Life is not a billboard with a naked man and woman, and a box of chocolates.
‘We must embrace all these things that we grow up with — do not look at the one as being worse than the other.”