If the content of this year’s FNB Dance Umbrella has been about anything, it’s been about private territories — places artists inhabit in the, ‘um … ah”, subconscious recesses of their heads. For unseasoned audience members, much of what happens on such a platform will appear to be a grand-scale exercise in navel-gazing. And why, one asks, should the belly button not be a valid field of focus in contemporary art?The preceding decades of globalised culture — ubiquitous Americanisation, pandemics and ethnic wars — have given rise to a cliché: that the human body itself is a ‘site of struggle”. And no form lends itself better to an exploration of this than dance with its language conveyed through movement alone.Well, almost. If contemporary choreographers were indeed to abandon the accoutrements that have become standard to the genre, then the field would be cleared of thousands of hours of shaky, blurred video footage (of very little) and mountains of over-symbolic props such as sand, wood, fabric and water.
Two pieces at this year’s event showed the international standard of extremes. First there was I Wouldn’t Be Seen Dead in That, choreographed by Elu and Steven Cohen. This well-heeled production had its dancers (of Ballet Atlantique-Régine Chopinot) manipulating stuffed giraffe and kudu heads and legs in what could possibly be construed as a statement against hunting and the more abstract costs, to the brain, incurred by the fashion world. Much store has been put in the fact that the production arrived with a chorus line of European dancers, brandishing its own critique in the programme, signed ‘Amelie Pailla, French Philosopher”. One can expect no greater accolade in life than to be considered worthy of such a theoretical treatise — almost like having your own praise poet harp on about you before you speak. And while Pallia took great pains in her writing to understand how Cohen and company danced in order to resurrect the very spirit of the dead creatures they ‘wouldn’t be seen dead in”, in a very European manner she also took great pains to avoid dealing with Cohen as the self-questioning, transvestite Jew. Pallia didn’t exactly ask, in her treatise, what it was about his Jewishness (or his homosexuality) that Cohen ‘wouldn’t be seen dead in”. Surely she could not have missed the booming synagogue chanting or the enormous Star of David Cohen wore on his head? If, as Pallia noted, Elu and Cohen danced ‘to return moral life to the animal remains by re-imbuing them with what has been taken away: movement”, then could not the same be said of what Cohen is trying to convey as a Jew?
Since Pallia didn’t deal with the subject, it seems we’ll never know. What we can conclude is that, while Cohen has politicised his own body, in his latest piece he has also politicised the bodies of the creatures he resurrected. And so we have dance about ‘wild animals as a site of struggle”. Not bad.On the far end of the scale was Emio Greco’s Double Points: One & Two, directed by Pieter C Scholten. This pair of short pieces ‘questions and at the same time pursues the utopia of synchronicity, or the construction of accidental concurrence of circumstances”, according to the programme note. And here we found Greco and co-performer Bertha Bermudez Pascual on an empty stage, uncannily synchronised. They were like bookends, dancing to the kind of house music that kids go mad for in nightclubs worldwide. In the vast, month-long programme of the FNB Dance Umbrella this work provided a rare interrogation of the void of meaning that exists in the commercially overwhelming world of recreational dance. A subject that, one assumes, will gain in prominence as local choreographers make art out of the real-life happenings around them. Real-life issues faced by dancers have been the subjects of much Dance Umbrella fare in recent years.
This year a smattering of dancer discontent sneaked in. There was Mark Hawkins’s Excerpts from a Ballerina’s Life: Stage II, in which stagehands were employed to literally remove the platform on which the tutu-clad prima ballerina was cavorting. Here, David Gouldie provided evocatively shot black-and-white video footage of a classical dancer’s lot, made up of endless hours of mascara. Hawkins’s piece sat well alongside Phenomenomadic, a particularly grudging, satirical work by Jeanette Ginslov and Nathaniel Stern, in which actors did unkind portrayals of successful choreographers Jay Pather, Vincent Mantsoe, Gary Gordon and Robyn Orlin. Clearly, these pieces show that there are gaping wounds in the dance community, unhealed, that have left choreographers feeling unrecognised. At the same time, anger vented through satire provides a barometer by which vital freedoms are measured in any art scene.In her choice of figures to lambaste, Ginslov ignored DaimlerChrysler Award winner Sbonakaliso Ndaba — possibly because Ndaba is a new voice who has not yet engendered a cult of personality around her. Her work, Gathering, furthers her obsession with disturbed communities of individuals who fall into and out of trances for no apparent reason.With her young company, the Phenduka Dance Theatre, Ndaba illustrates how a minimum of technological fuzz is needed to make real meaning. Like a theatre director she has a clear insight into what works dramatically between characters and how intrigue and mystery can be used to maximum effect.This is important in the framing of what she does, because the unspecified rituals she creates, with no apparent basis in real tribal life, appear to be about dance as a remedy to society’s mental illness.
Earthdiving, last of the Spier Opera Season, is presented on March 14 and 15. More information and bookings: Tel: 809 1177/78 or visit the website: www.spier.co.za