The stage is filled with a dim, blue light. Six figures, two women and four men, barefoot, all dressed in loose white shirts and trousers, sit motionless on chairs around the perimeter. One of the figures gets up and stands absolutely still to one side of the stage. As the music begins to play, he is gradually surrounded by a pool of light.
He is a small man with a trim moustache, wearing elegant dark glasses. Four of the other figures gradually rise and approach him one by one, waving their hands in front of his eyes, barely touching him, a ritual of the senses. Still the small figure is motionless. There is something strange, hypnotic about his stillness, facing straight ahead.
The other dancers begin to move on the stage. The music intensifies.
The sixth figure stays seated, almost as motionless as the man in dark glasses. He is a large man, his legs stretched out in front of him, strangely twisted, a pair of crutches at his side. His big eyes watch the other dancers. The small man is still motionless upstage.
Then he gradually moves forward, lifts his arms, palms upward and then retreats again. The other dancers delicately guide him in different directions, left, right, back to his original position. We realise he is blind.
The dance becomes more frenzied in the centre of the stage. The small man’s slow, hypnotic movements are a counterpoint to the gradually increasing pace of the other dancers.
Suddenly, without warning, the sixth figure leaps into the fray from the side of the stage, moving with stunning speed on his crutches, his legs trailing uselessly beneath him. There is a fury about the way he attacks his path between the other bodies. He leaps up and down on the crutches with impossible agility, Richard III in the thick of battle, defying his crippling disability.
This is the Agulhas Theatre Works contemporary dance company on stage at the Frascati Theatre in Amsterdam, performing on the opening night of Afrovibes, a mini festival founded by South African performing artist Raymond Matinyana, who died of Aids in Amsterdam in 2001, at the age of just 31. Afrovibes continues in his name.
The dance company was founded by the classically trained dancer Gladys Agulhas, who choreographed the piece Encounters with the members of her company. This is one of many collaborations with Gregory Maqoma’s Vuyani Dance Theatre, two of whose members, Smolly Mashida and Melusi Mkhan-sane, are part of the group.
Agulhas, a powerful, radiant, presence on the stage, has been working with dancers of varied abilities and disabilities, professional and amateur, for many years. She says dance itself is therapy, a kind of leveller, a way of seeking perfection through the many imperfections we all share, whatever our physical condition. In performance, as in this latest production, it is also a dramatic way of illustrating the many daily encounters we have, how we react to them, and how differently we could relate to them if we were prepared to open ourselves to the idea of a common humanity.
Agulhas, Belinda Nagel and the two male dancers from Vuyani Dance company have a physical perfection that they use to beautiful effect on the stage. In the presence of their flowing muscularity, the eye is constantly drawn to the two performers with disabilities. As Agulhas says, in day-to-day life those of us who think we have healthy, perfect bodies constantly recoil from the disabled. Here, the choreography produces the opposite effect.
Chris ”Kappie” Isaacs comes from Keetmanshoop in what is now Namibia. As a young man, like many black Namibians, he was recruited into the apartheid-era South West Africa Defence Force and inevitably spent several hard years hunting his own kind, those labelled ”terrorists”, under the command of white South African officers.
He survived the war, but was blinded in the peace that followed during a savage mugging in central Johannesburg. He had never been involved in any formal dance until he met Agulhas.
David Fumbatha was born with crushingly disabled legs and completed his education at Soweto’s Adelaide Tambo School for Children with Special Needs. Dance therapy and professional performance has been part of his life for many years, although the excercises often make him suffer excruciating pain. Agulhas always presses him to go on, to push his body to its limits, as any dancer, in different ways, is obliged to do.
Both men give riveting performances in the midst of their more agile counterparts. Isaacs’s pas de deux with Agulhas is delicately moving. Fumbatha’s duet with Nagel requires more acrobatic power and is astonishing for its tenderness in spite of this.
Across town, photographer Zanele Muholi opens an exhibition of her works that exposes another kind of perceived disability — the dilemma of a black lesbian in a violent, men-dominated society. The subject is dealt with in a startlingly beautiful manner, literally hiding nothing, challenging the labelling that is imposed by both women and men in black South Africa.
On this opening evening, both Agulhas and Moholi speak of their work afterwards, independently giving a fierce indictment of the new South Africa in which they, or the people they choose to work with, have become the new oppressed. ”Our wonderful new Constitution has no meaning for someone like me,” says Moholi. And yet their work equally shows a strong commitment to carry on with what they are doing, in the way they choose to do it, in the land of their birth.