The FNB Dance Umbrella turns 20 and, as a creature of that age, it shows all the characteristics of a 20-year-old. If the event were indeed a young person it would be self-conscious, precocious, ambitious and accomplished beyond its years.
Artistic director Georgina Thompson, who lived in Durban when the event began, says: ‘From day one it was quite clear that it was an open and contemporary platform for new work. They were quite clear in saying to everyone, ‘If you want to come out and play this is the place to do it.’”
Last weekend saw an unprecedented audience at the Stepping Stones event for choreography by youth. Decades ago the dance scene was overseen by white ballet moms, daughters and packed lunches in tow. Nowadays at the Wits Theatre auditorium you see the post-apartheid equivalent: pantsula jive moms come to watch their township offspring take to the stage, bringing along grannies, aunties and hyperactive toddlers.
There’s something wild going on in pantsula jive — young girls scream like fans at a rock concert as the boys in white takkies do their perfectly coordinated moves. The plots take on moments of realism — playground frolics, nostalgia for the Sophiatown days and sexual harassment. The form now includes elements of ballroom, marabi and kwasa kwasa borrowed from the foreigners in our midst.
‘There has been a whole connection between different sectors of the community all discovering one another; that has been exciting for me,” Thompson says about the development of the form and its nurturing under the Dance Umbrella.
She rattles off the names of companies and individuals who have gone international and gained reputations at home, in part as a result of the space offered to them at this event: Boyzie Cekwana, Gregory Maqoma, Vincent Mantsoe, Moving into Dance Mophatong.
‘When we started it was a predominantly white platform, but people were coming in from Soweto — and there was this discovery. Robyn Orlin started working with Lucky Diale. Sonya Mayo began to use black dancers and it evolved. Yesterday I was the only white person here.”
But the cross-cultural collaborations have also meant new contexts for old ideas. Take Orlin’s new work, due to premiere at the Umbrella, that uses the quaint swenka tradition as its starting point.
Swenkas are a local cultural phenomenon as specific as Cape Town’s Tweede Nuwe Jaar street carnival and the Miss Gay Soweto drag beauty pageant. For those who do not know about them, they are the charming gentlemen who, for decades, have held personal style competitions in the basements of the city, competing at times for money, watches and even cows.
And now Orlin is collaborating with real-life swenkas in a work celebrating the contests, wittily titled Dressed to Kill/Killed to Dress. The piece is one of two she is presenting this year. The second is a work made with pantsula group Via Katlehong and it will share the bill with choreography especially for the pantsulas by French choreographer Christian Rizzo.
But Dressed to Kill is an Orlin world premiere and on a deeper level shows the historical link between the swenkas and this major international choreographer. No kidding.
Orlin’s family has owned some of the top shops favoured by swenkas over the decades. The stores Kays and Swanks were legendary in downtown Johannesburg, where working-class men gazed lovingly at the packed windows of clothing that literally floated on hangers suspended by invisible gut. Brands like Florsheim, Crockett & Jones, Pringle, Brentwood, Dickies and the list goes on.
‘This piece is very much about my memories of being a child,” Orlin says. ‘And the swenkas are very much a part of that because they used to come and buy clothes from my father’s and my uncle’s shops.
‘Every Saturday morning I used to go to ballet and I had to walk to my father’s office or to my uncle’s shop to get picked up to get driven home. I used to watch these men come in and buy their clothes. Eventually I was told what was going on. They were so smart and they made a great impression on me.”
The rehearsal room in Newtown is perhaps a kilometre from where those shops stood. The place is a slightly rundown, old warehouse where many companies hire rehearsal space. Its atmosphere reminds you of the early days of Dorkay House, Fuba centre and the Market Theatre when there was a hub of black creativity in what were then the less-conspicuous corners of the inner city.
Miraculously Orlin has not strayed from her roots even though she is the recipient of an Olivier Award and last year presented a work at the Paris Opera House, where she worked with the dance corps of the Paris Opera Ballet.
This was her opportunity to ‘have a big budget of millions of rands and I could do what I always wanted to do: a form of animation live in the theatre. Technologically,” she says, ‘I could fly.”
Later, though, when I prod her on the issue of under-resourced theatre in Africa she confesses: ‘It does not affect my creative vision. The more limited I am the better. I can’t spend millions on my work because of the kind of person that I am.”
Recently Orlin, who now lives in Berlin with filmmaker husband Oliver Schmitz, suffered a bout of breast cancer. That, and the adoption of Ruby, her daughter of Zulu heritage, have had a profound affect on her.
‘I’m a lot more careful about the way I work with people now,” says the choreographer known for her tough rehearsal process. ‘I need to know much more about the people I work with.
‘I hope I haven’t lost my sense of humour,” she says nervously. ‘I am working with four real swenkas and I don’t want to offend what they love doing.”
The details
Dressed to Kill/Killed to Dress shows at the Market Theatre on February 22 and 23. The FNB Dance Umbrella runs at various venues in Jo’burg until March 15. For information call Tel: 072 703 9332