Instead of conducting routine interviews with dancers and performance artists billed to perform at this year’s FNB Dance Umbrella, we decided to invite artists to submit motivations for their works.
In these, it is clear that seasoned choreographers have taken the experience of youth and the crisis of aging as the entry points from which to begin their explorations.
In the world of dance, the issue of ageing is complicated by the fact that as dancers grow older their bodies become less supple. At the same time a new generation comes to the fore with new ideas taken from the streets where one sees the fomenting of popular dance.
This leads one to question whether our senior dancers really are out the loop and whether their insecurity is fertile ground on which to construct good dance. Audiences will be able to judge for themselves when two of the country’s most senior contemporary dancers — Tossie van Tonder and Gary Gordon — take to the stage next week.
Van Tonder, who began in the heady early Eighties heyday of avant-garde performance, is no stranger to bringing the everyday on to the formal stage. Back then her performances included frying meat and meandering around the stage in a haphazard manner. Her latest piece titled Alfabet looks at the career of a dancer and, as she writes, ‘a life lived in and through the female body, in ceremony”.
Gordon is South Africa’s grand old man of dance and he heads up the acclaimed First Physical Theatre Company in Grahamstown.
His work at the Dance Umbrella is titled Go and asks the question: ‘Where is the older or mature choreographer and dancer among all this? Is his or her position exclusively as mentor, coach or educator?”
Prevalent themes this year take a serious turn. Peter van Heerden’s performance piece 6 minutes is dedicated to abused children, claiming that every six minutes a child is raped. In his poetic motivation, he writes: ‘As an emerging nation forging a new culture, we need to be careful what we invest in. Abuse is not nor should become a part of our culture. As a white, English-speaking African I am in pursuit of a culture. We are yoked in and on the move, dragging the past into the present so that our children can understand the future.”
Tossie van Tonder
When she was young, my mother was prohibited from dancing. My grandfather thought that shoes were not for kicking around. She had to study and there was no money for fooling around.
Once she was caught wearing a pair of tap shoes she had borrowed from her friend Dora. She thought her father had no way of knowing she went to dance classes since she attended a boarding school in town and his visits to her were regular, except for that one.
That was the end of my mother’s dance classes. Later on she decided to become a nurse. It was respectable, not to mention useful. But when she said she would be training at a hospital for black male patients my grandfather put his foot down. My mother never became a dancer, or a nurse.
My mother made more than 16 dance costumes for me between the years 1959 to 1972. These were the days before lycra and overlockers. What’s more, she preserved these costumes until recently. When I asked after them I found them in pristine condition including my Voortrekker rokkie [dress] and a fairy dress in which I danced at the Laerskool Dagbreek in Carletonville. Most of these costumes were designed by my dance teacher Anna Nell.
At the preparations for our yearly concert, we would each collect a parcel from her. It contained a very cryptic but straightforward pen drawing coloured in with crayons on an A5 page, together with four or five instructions on how to make the costume. It also contained all the materials: fabric, decorations, hooks and eyes, et cetera. My mother took it on herself to line almost all my costumes because at that time fabric was often harsh on a soft skin, especially around the upper thighs.
My father would attend only one concert each year. Dance was a vroumens storie (women’s story). Late one night, my mother and I got home from a concert. We off-loaded my costumes and she began to take off my make-up. I protested heatedly. My father got up in the middle of the night, set up his camera, tripod and a white reflector umbrella in front of a folding door between the lounge and dining room. Then he photographed me in all my costumes.
The pictures he took have a colour to them that defies time.
Gary Gordon
Over the years I have become fascinated with older bodies in dance performance — possibly because I am in that age bracket. Looking at festivals in this country, I have seen the power, grace and subtlety of the older body — particularly in traditional dances where the span of life and living is reflected in the various ages of the dancers.
I think I have reached that point as an individual and choreographer when you begin to contemplate the space between the sheer exuberance of yourself as a young dancer and what makes you dance now.
One asks oneself the question: How can you dance now? I don’t want to be sitting on a set looking sad and pointing to the younger dancers as a part of my memory. I want to embody my memories myself and also to play out the future stillness.
From this standpoint, the current work Go is a chance to observe the mature choreographer in his world. Can he in fact still dance? What set him going? Where does he go next?
The FNB Dance Umbrella takes place in Johannesburg until March 17. On February 23 and 24 see Alfabet, choreographed by Tossie van Tonder, on February 26 and 27 see Gary Gordon’s Go, on February 26 and 27 see Germany’s Gerda Konig and Kenya’s Ondiege Matthew in CounterCircles, on February 28 and March 1 see Swiss choreographers Katarzyna Gdaniec and Marco Cantalupo in Emballe-moi, on February 28 and March 1 see Peter van Heerden and the erf [81] cultural collective in 6 minutes. These performances take place at Wits Theatre, Braamfontein. For more information visit: www.artslink.co.za/arts or Tel: (011) 482 4140