We’re dancers. We don’t express ourselves too well in words, so bear with us,” said local choreographer Moeketsi Koena nervously into the microphone at a gathering of local media, suited sponsors and fellow dancers in Johannesburg this week.
Koena was the first of nine local choreographers to take the mic and introduce themselves and their work as part of the official launch of Dance ’99, the seventh annual Arts Alive International Dance Festival, to be staged from September 1-26 at the Dance Factory in Newtown, Johannesburg.
Dreadlocks peeking coyly from beneath his headgear, Koena proceeded, like most of those after him, to explain his own process of choreographic soul-searching to a usually apathetic media. He then announced a new venture between himself and fellow dancer Sello Pesa: their youth-oriented Inzalo Dance and Theatre Company. Inzalo will be one of a host of new works and projects making their international debut at this year’s festival.
According to the Dance Factory’s Suzette le Sueur, Tuesday’s function – which predictably enough boiled down to a renewed plea for financial support of local dance – had been arranged to “celebrate our own artists before the international artists arrive” and also to allow the media to “put faces to the names of a new generation of local choreographers”.
Names like Moeketsi Koena, who, says Le Sueur, is contributing to “a truly exciting moment in local dance”. Koena is one of a number of South African choreographers who have in the past year or two – as local dance has begun to find its feet internationally – taken advantage of bursaries to study and work abroad. The likes of Koena, who has spent the past 18 months based in Europe; Pesa, who recently returned from a year at London’s Northern School of Contemporary Dance; and Gregory Maqoma, just back from Brussels, says Le Sueur, represent a return of ideas to the local contemporary dance pool and the chance for further collaboration on the Arts Alive platform.
As another member of the new boy’s club, PJ Sabbagha, put it, “Their return is a welcome injection. Suddenly we are aware that we’ve been on the right track internationally.” Sabbagha’s Forgotten Angle Theatre Company will be presenting an excerpt from their epic new work Noah’s Phobia in the third of seven programmes presented throughout the month.
Just installing the company’s huge set will be a strain for the cash-strapped Dance Factory, but in the spirit of the dance struggle the rest of the choreographers on Programme Three (the contemporary showcase) will also be using Sabbagha’s vast white construction for their own work. The programme will include brand new works by the ever-avant-garde Robyn Orlin and two rapidly rising local talents – Reginald Danster and Elu.
Danster, who has hardly had time to establish himself at home, will be using the occasion to say goodbye as he takes up the prestigious Rio Tinto Scholarship to study at the London School of Contemporary Dance.
Elu, on the other hand, will be staying on to offend the old school further. Last month in Cape Town, for example, despite presenting audiences with the first showing of his intense and beautiful Sacrum (stomping ballet on point to a thrash rock soundtrack) he left Cape Town’s Vita Dance Umbrella best remembered for having caused a certain Vita Award judge to resign in disgust over his saucy collaborations with his lover, the performance artist Steven Cohen.
Elu will be offering more of the same at this year’s Arts Alive festival, taking part in three public performances with Cohen aside from his work on Programme Three. On Tuesday, though, the first issue he wanted sorting out was the matter of his name. “It’s my real name. It’s my father’s name too. It’s in my book of life,” he told the media in response to the same Vita judge having bitched that the offending artists didn’t even have the decency to use a real name.
“I’ve been working for seven years,” said Elu, “and the first five years were without a cent of funding.” It’s this struggle, added most of the choreographers introduced on Tuesday, that has bred a particularly rich and defiant local contemporary dance tradition.
Of course, once the international guests reach the festival, the local work will again no doubt be overshadowed in the media. Hardly surprising, considering the fact that the festival has managed to attract the Brussels-based Rosas company. Their crazy-mad freestyle gem Drumming is widely considered to be one of the finest works on offer anywhere in the world right now. The distinctly dishy Kenneth Kvarnstrom and his company of Finnish and Swedish dancers will also be gracing the festival.