African American dance doyen Donald Byrd headed the jury of the recently awarded DaimlerChrysler Award for South African choreography. While he was in Southern Africa he had a chance to travel to Mozambique and to meet with South African choreographers and dancers who he spoke to about the interrelation between the subcontinent and the United States.
Matthew Krouse spoke to him after the awarding of the DaimlerChrysler about whether or not South African dance is labouring under foreign influences.
I’m interested to know whether we have a unique dance idiom in this country or whether we are borrowing left and right – and whether it’s an issue?
I don’t know what unique means really. I think there’s potential for extremely distinctive way of looking at contemporary dance here. I think that Sbo’s [Sbonakaliso Ndaba – DaimlerChrysler Award winner] work that we saw during the competition is actually quite extraordinary because of its vision – the way she sees the world. And I think that vision and that particular way of seeing and that vision is unique to South Africa. I suspect this might be the beginning of a really unique and distinctive way of creating.
Is there anything wrong with borrowing and lending?
No. I think all art borrows – it borrows and transforms. And I think that’s what I saw during this competition. Not so much [transformation of] ideas in terms of content, but in terms of ways of structuring and ways of seeing movement borrowed from the European. The black Africans borrow European movements, the white South Africans borrow black African movement, but it gets filtered through the personality and the temperament of the person who is making the work. And it is transformed by that process.
America culture, whatever that may be, is getting a lot of bad press – you hear it over and over: “that’s so American” – and that American culture is infiltrating the youth. What are your feelings about that, as a black American – do you think you’re bringing
something bad?
I think when you get something you get the whole package – you don’t just get the good or you don’t just get the bad but you get the whole package. I think that quite often America is accused of practising cultural imperialism or cultural terrorism – is my new way of putting it. And that’s not completely true. There’s some truth to that, but I think it really is about capitalism. America’s culture and capitalism are so embedded and so entwined, that as capitalist ideas spread around the world and come into different parts of the world – the American aspect kind of comes along with it. And so not only do you have capitalism, you have ideas and visions about democracy. Which is why the idea of American culture or western thinking and western ways of doing things is frightening to people who don’t want democracy, who don’t want free thinking or open free presses.
And when you come with your positive energy what do you bring?
Well I think that one of the things that we bring is a kind of adoration of the individual. The individualism is really powerful in America. And I think that’s what we bring – that kind of individual drive and determination and entrepreneurial spirit. But I think also what comes along with that – the flipside – are cults of personality and then we have stardom and celebrity.
The French made such an effort to try to suppress American ideas and Americanisms from seeping into their culture. But it’s not a kind of totalitarianism that does it. People are not made to accept [Americanisation] – they accept it because something about it actually speaks to them in a way that’s meaningful. So they embrace it for that reason. So it’s not that it’s imposed on people.
It could be how easily your culture is not addressing some of the things that the culture might think that’s important. There are certain things about American culture that does not address certain aspects of how many Americans feel. Like Americans do not like to sit still long enough to really self examine and contemplate – it’s difficult for them. And our culture has not encouraged that because it’s about productivity and efficiency. So I think that all cultures are deficient in some ways. They don’t provide everything and one of the things about the world opening up and being open for the free flow of ideas and people is that those things that are missing get filled in by the culture that comes in. And it will balance itself out in the end.
Emotively, what is your feeling about the quality of work you have seen?
I think the quality of work is really high.
What is very high? Is very high of international, professional standard, or very high say, for Africa?
This work could exist on the international platform very easily. I think some of it would be really compelling to people. Sbo’s work would really be fascinating to people because it does two things that I think are interesting. In some ways it gives them some of what they expect – what people in Africa are supposed to be doing right now. But it is certainly another take on it. It is completely not that. It has elements of that but it is very universal in terms of the inherent message in it. The thing that I find fascinating about it is that you can’t say it’s about this or this. It really speaks to you on some deep profound intuitive level which is I think where art is at its most effective.
So we’ve got a winner.
You definitely have a winner. I would definitely love her work to be seen in the United States. I would actually love three or four pieces of these, actually, to be seen in the United States – a festival of contemporary South African dance. Because one of the things it will do is that it will confront the notions that people have about what contemporary South African dance is.
What are those notions?
First of all they probably think – not even probably, I know that many people think that it is bad, or some post-Sarafina kind of thing. Or it’s people imitating European or American forms without ever understanding or ever having personalised them. But the work is much more sophisticated than that – its very distinctive. South Africa is an industrialised nation it’s not a third world country.