Jay Pather envisaged his latest work, Body of Evidence — which examines how violence is embedded in our collective bone marrow — being performed among the operating tables in a surgical theatre at Hillbrow Hospital.
But clearing the red tape proved difficult. Instead the choreographer with a predilection for site-specific work will conduct his ‘forensic examination” of South Africa’s violent past and present on top of an old medical centre in downtown Jo’burg, the Lister Building in Jeppe Street.
On the 19th floor, far from the sometimes violent streets, there are references to Pather’s urge to respond — through Body of Evidence — to the dislocation between pronouncements on violence by politicians, the media and producers of culture and reality.
Body of Evidence appears to question the unfinished business of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, highlighting the ‘lines of continuity” that exist between violent action in 1976 and in 2008. He seeks to understand how brutalised psyches, ignored in the post-1994 drive towards rainbow nationalism, carry the scars of violence.
Pather believes the attribution of violence in South Africa to the emasculated black male is ‘too pat and too easy”, carrying with it increasingly racist undertones.
‘We seem to be talking about aggression, rape and murder in very narrow language, without acknowledging the textures of our society. Black men have become easy targets for vilification and objects of parody. There is a racist edge to that level of representation — it is the ease with which it emerges that bothers me,” says Pather, who feels this discourse misses an important point: why?
Pather says Body of Evidence was born out of a personal ‘preoccupation with violence” and the sense that pain experienced is a ‘singularly existential condition that can never be fully conveyed to anyone else”.
‘There are theories that memories of pain can never be obliterated. Part of that memory becomes part of the tissue, of the marrow in our bones. And in our collective history there is so much physical and psychological pain,” he says.
Hearing Pather describe it, Body of Evidence appears a sort of post-truth commission dance platform.
Pather will use large-scale projections by artist Storm Janse van Rensburg of bones and cross-sections of brains, sourced from anatomy books and contemporary television series such as Grey’s Anatomy. The accompanying music, composed by James Webb, is derived from ‘sounds the body makes deep inside, when swallowing or breathing”.
Pather says the projections are old anatomical diagrams mirroring the sense of ‘naivete” in our understanding of our violent condition — the flat earth syndrome we appear to suffer from in a miscomprehension of the condition of violence.
So, has he been able to fully understand our violent condition? ‘I’m still grappling with it,” he says, ‘but this experience will stay with me forever.”
Body of Evidence will be performed on March 14 and 15 at the Lister Building in Jeppe Street, Johannesburg