For the first time the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown this year concedes a new performing arts category: dance and physical theatre. In a shifting, contested and topsy-turvy cultural landscape like ours the significance of this little nomenclature change begs comment. (The section used to be called — and is still so designated, curiously, in the index to the festival booking kit — ‘danceâ€.) The festival mandarins are merely giving sanction to a well-developed trend: you can hardly enter an auditorium these days without being assaulted by a lot more than mere actors expressing themselves on stage. A gamut of effects including video, slides, animated graphics (multimedia) music, dance, paint, props and performers peculiarly en pointe all announce today’s burgeoning new genre: physical theatre. At the international level, the work of South African artists coming at physical theatre from different disciplines has won considerable plaudits. Dancer-choreographer Robyn Orlin famously won an Olivier Award in London last year for her solo presentation; performance artist Steven Cohen has crashed barriers between pictorial and performance art; the Handspring Puppet Company and artist William Kentridge have invigorated the august stage genre of opera. Yet in South Africa, the terrain is fraught with controversy — and physical theatre work of widely varying quality. Mark Fleishman is senior lecturer in drama at the University of Cape Town and, through a series of innovative productions of his Magnet Theatre Company, a leading exponent of physical theatre. He concedes that the danger is two forms of stagecraft developing in South Africa: ‘Traditional text-based plays in which people sit around a table endlessly chatting, and [physical theatre] productions without structure where actors slap a few disconnected physical images together in a space. The challenge in both cases is for writers to understand the forms they’re working with.â€Yet if physical theatre is enlisting new audiences through its representation of novel social realities, isn’t there a contrary danger of losing patrons through a rarefied vocabulary of gesture rather than words that’s hard to decode? Fleishman espies, indeed, two possible forms of physical theatre evolving, a ‘high†and a ‘low†(my terms, not his): ‘The one form is popular, marked by simple narrative, with an educational focus; the other is frankly for an audience trained in the vocabulary and ready to work at creating new meaning.â€Gary Gordon, professor of dance and drama at Rhodes, is undoubtedly the doyen of physical theatre training and stage creation in South Africa: his First Physical Theatre Company (‘putting the physical first — that’s where the name comes fromâ€) celebrates 10 years of ground-breaking stagecraft this year at Grahamstown with a five-work retrospective, Out of the Moon. Although his company works hard at sourcing new audiences, Gordon unashamedly espouses the ‘high†form of physical theatre: ‘Our complex language frightens some people. Each of our works presents the audience with pieces of a puzzle, which they must assemble for themselves.†To Fleishman, the ultimate — and ironic — consequence of this complexity is the phenomenon of the Handspring company, whose multimedia projects ‘are generated in South Africa, out of a South African ethos, but can only play overseas. Our industry here can’t deal with that degree of depth.â€Whether the high/low disjunction points to a pressing need for audience development and training — a point on which all role-players vigorously coincide — it is the exciting possibilities for fashioning new meaning that appeals to new theatre makers. Zingi Mkefa is a young choreographer and dancer with the First Physical company, who has imbibed physical theatre principles and techniques from his mentors Gordon and Andrew Buckland — ‘a physical theatre practitioner whose popularity is tied to the humour he brings to simple, sound storytellingâ€.To Mkefa, physical theatre ‘is perfect for the times: things are not essentialised, our reality is one of multitasking, of ambiguities in identity. Physical theatre is about the interplay between the boundaries of dance and theatre, of finding connections between things previously separate. This involves discipline, coherence of intention, focus.†Jay Pather, whose new work Home premieres at Grahamstown next month, adds: ‘Some people are unhappy with physical theatre’s hybridisation: it’s ‘impure’. But it’s only impure because of imposed categories: one person’s impurity is another’s only way.†As the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown is likely to attest, physical theatre remains the site of innovation, experiment and challenge — of growth.