Petra is uncomfortable. At times it’s violent. Then quirky, then tender. It’s brave, sometimes mysterious, always outspoken, disturbing, intimate and human.
Choreographer Peter Sabbagha, winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year for Dance is hesitant about labelling the collaborative dance project. “It’s about many things” he says, pausing; “It’s about our bodies, our personal relationships, and our sexual relationships. It’s about fear and our kind of inhuman responses and treatment of each other when we’re being interrogated, when we are trapped by fear, and then the acting out, the violation of each other that follows”.
Petra is the result of a long process of research, undertaken by Sabbagha initially, then explored further in a collaborative process with artists including Nathaniel Stern, Jennifer Fergusen, Craig Morris, Athena Mazarakis and Dawid Minaard. “We ask questions around the issues we’re exploring”, Sabbagha explains, “and what we kind of create is our artistic responses to that”.
The various themes running through Petra are explored in the language of movement, music and multimedia, using moments in South Africa’s history as well as the contemporary moment to provide a context for the work. Through dance and “a theatre of the body”, Sabbagha examines the experience of homosexuality within the SANDF during the apartheid era, and links this to the current social and personal crisis around our inability to deal with HIV/Aids. “The most horrific human rights atrocities were committed against gay and lesbian people” says Sabbagha, although much of this is not publicly acknowledged, and Sabbagha finds parallels between this and HIV/Aids.
To say this is a piece about HIV/Aids and homosexuality, however, would not be accurate. Sabbagha has created layers within layers, and meaning under meaning, making the work fluid, dynamic, probing and questioning. “We explore these issues from a deeply emotional and human perspective” says Sabbagha, “and how our history and the present moment force things into silence, force relationships underground, force us into secrecy”. Sabbagna is intrigued by people “living in a world of secrets and lies that is fracturing, falling apart and unravelling” because of an inability to confront ourselves and our stories.
The name and concept of the dance piece are integrally related, linking the individual and the personal to the social. Petra began with an article Sabbagha read about an early case of gender reassignation that resulted from a botched circumcision. Petra is also the feminine of Sabbagha’s first name, Peter, and a “Peter-Petra” is an anatomical model that has both male and female genitals, “so the piece was going to be called Peter-Petra” explains Sabbagha, pausing, “but then, because we’re following one principle narrative, and it’s a woman’s story, we called the piece Petra“, he concludes.
For Sabbagha, the most rewarding part of the process of creating Petra has been being able to take extraordinary risks with the subject matter, “and the way in which we approach it”, Sabbagha adds. “What we’ve done with the piece is strip it down to a technological poor theatre so it’s a theatre of the body”, he says.
And Petra really is a theatre of the body, speaking in a language stripped of pretence and convention, that involves the audience in the physical acts witnessed on stage. I left the experience feeling exhausted, disturbed, and immensely satisfied. It’s not a comfortable work, or an easy work to watch. “This is the most terrifying and rewarding thing about this project”, adds Sabbagha, “it can either succeed or fail”. -RU-NML