Once they were called buskers. Now they’re called ‘site-specific contemporary dancers”.
Is there a difference? Money, is the mark of distinction.
Buskers are the guys wailing Bob Marley tunes on street corners. They are the traditional white-faced mimes that get under your feet while you’re trying to shop. Their floppy hats lie on dusty pavements filled with a few coins. But site-specific performers are in it for art — if they get offered money, on the street, they’ll turn it down.
In the next month Johannesburg, like Durban before it, will see some investigative moves taking place in unpredictable surrounds. With choreographer Jay Pather at the helm, the Cityscapes project will move from malls to hotel rooms commenting, while it rambles, on power relations in an African city.
The first performance in the Cityscapes series began on February 2 at the Oriental Plaza in Fordsburg, Johannesburg. It was a Saturday morning — the first Saturday of the month — and there was shopping mayhem. In what is called The Well, at the centre of the Indian shopping centre, Pather had placed chairs and tables amid escalators and stalls selling everything from luggage to Islamic religious paraphernalia.
This leg of Cityscapes was about the different strata of individuals found in a place like the Oriental Plaza. Waiters, shoppers, security guards and parents with kids. Dressed in white, with white faces, they danced in unison with little reverence for the space they invaded. This was dance about the moment. Uncharacteristic for a piece of ‘site-specific” art there appeared to be no acknowledgement of the historical tribulations endured by the community of traders, decades ago, when they were forcibly removed from Pageview and resettled in the shopping mall they now inhabit.
Shirley Bassey boomed through loudspeakers. I approached a veiled shopkeeper in a peppermint sari standing in her doorway watching in slight confusion. ‘Do you know what’s going on?” I asked. ‘No,” she said, ‘all I know is that they are being filmed for television.”
Later that day Pather’s troupe of development dancers from his company Siwela Sonke took to the giant chessboard on the expansive piazza at the heart of the Carlton Centre.
The Shibekwa Dance Ensemble and Moving into Dance supplied this leg of Cityscapes with some nifty Pantsula jivers, dancing to a jazzed-up version of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Some of the blokes were decked out in black pinstripe suits and white gloves — latter day African minstrels. Others wore loud Hawaiian shirts and carried balloons up and down the Cartlon’s bustling escalators.
The security staff — more a private army — hassled spectators, keeping them behind makeshift barricades. Unwittingly, they had become integral to the power play in Pather’s city showcase.
‘It’s gone well,” says Pather, looking forward to the next three instalments of Cityscapes. These are due to take place at Sandton Square, the Devonshire Hotel and the Johannesburg Art Gallery where artists Usha Seejaram, Jo Ractliffe, Tereza Collins and Movement 76 will interpret video footage of the site-specific performances.
Pather sounds relieved and he should be. His gig has taken some coordination. Wherever it goes, Cityscapes and its entourage are highly visible.
‘The object is for the work to draw attention to itself,” he admits. ‘There is amplified sound and one makes use of the very specific space. It intervenes but I don’t want it to be alienating.
‘In the middle of the Eighties and the beginning of the Nineties, with a lot of the political intervention in performance we used to do in Cape Town and in Durban, there would be something that would happen that wouldn’t appear to be happening. Then it was much more connected to challenging political space.
‘I’ve tried to create a performance mode that is entertaining but also has metaphor, has symbol. I want audiences to walk by and go, ‘ah, there’s something going on here. It doesn’t always happen like this, but what a cool thing. I’m included, rather than made to feel alienated by it.’”
While Pather is reaching out to the bulk of the public who seldom go to theatre he believes he is doing more than just ‘taking theatre to the people.”
‘A public space is rich with aesthetics, or non-aesthetics. There are points of tension there quite different to what you get on a clear stage inside a theatre with cushioned seats. So it’s not just about taking theatre to the people, but about finding the complexities of my everyday life inside the work.
‘It has been a way of making art that embraces the complexity of living in a South African city — with all the contradiction and grain that may not always sit well in the stomach.”
The dark side of city living will present itself in a room in the Devonshire Hotel when Pather explores sexual relations in secret spaces. First performed in Durban, in the Albany Hotel ‘beside massage parlours”, this piece also highlights the atmospheric difference between Johannesburg and Durban.
‘The layering of secrets as a theme in Durban, at the Albany Hotel, is very different to the layering of secrets in the middle of Braamfontein,” says Pather. ‘In Johannesburg it’s more hard edged — the level of survival or how one goes about surviving.
‘The Albany is desperate, but its desperation is not about life and death — there’s a kind of emotional cushioning.
‘The Devonshire Hotel, even though it’s a better-heeled hotel, has a history of being hard edged. It has evolved from something — being in the heart of the business district — to what it is now. The streets are quite bleak at night. It’s about the survival of a centre where the centre has moved to Sandton.”
Cityscapes is funded by the First National Bank, the National Arts Council, the Johannesburg Development Agency and the Inner City Business Coalition. Even with its rough edges it signals a growing willingness on the part of mainstream funders to use contemporary performance in exploring the outer limits of the metropolis.
The FNB Dance Umbrella 2003 runs in Johannesburg until March 15 at the Wits Theatre, the Nelson Mandela Theatre and the Dance Factory. For information Tel: (011) 442 8435 or visit www.artslink.co.za/fnb