If it hadn’t been for the financial crisis of 2008 “The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities”, a paper by Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, would be known only to people in finance and economics.
The groundbreaking paper, written in 1973, proposed an equation to price and calculate accurately derivatives, the financial instruments that resulted in the multibillion-dollar ruin the world is still trying to recover from.
It was Scholes and Black who were foremost in my mind when I went to interview Sello Pesa, whose new work, Tshwene ga ipone Makopo, will be staged at the old Johannesburg Stock Exchange. (Tshwene ga ipone Makopo is a SePedi saying that literally means: “A monkey does not see its own forehead”, or its biblical equivalent: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”).
But Pesa quickly disabused me of all ideas involving derivatives; his work, he told me, doesn’t really deal with what goes on in a stock exchange. His interests in the JSE are more, let’s just say, plebeian.
For Pesa, the old JSE reminds him of his childhood; his years in Soweto, when he had to dress up in his “Christmas clothes” to go to town. His interest in the edifice lies in its changed status, what it represented then and what it means now; from being the heart of South African capitalism to its present nondescript status as just another office block whose only claim to fame is its previous incarnation.
The work (which was in rehearsal at the time of the interview and which Pesa is withholding from the press) is meant to “challenge people to reflect where we stand today and how we can look to the future with different eyes”.
Alternative spaces
For Pesa, the artistic director of Ntsoana Contemporary Dance Theatre, the JSE was where a taxi rank was located in days gone by. It was both a drop-off and pick-up zone: the first building he cast his eyes on when he got out of the taxi and the last when he got back on the taxi. “Yet I had never been inside,” he said.
Staging his work away from a theatre opened up the old debate about utilising “alternative spaces”. In the past few months Pesa and company — conceptual collaborator, artist Vaughn Sadie and company members Humphrey Maleka and Brian Mthembu — have pushed back the limits of alternative spaces. Earlier this year their production, Inhabitants, was staged right in the middle of Main Street, Johannesburg.
The production, meant to explore Johannesburg’s “recyclers” and their lives on the street, wasn’t the kind you want to watch in the company of people with weak nerves. Bodies lay still on the tarmac, seemingly oblivious of the dangers. When a vehicle (the road is frequently used by taxis) approached, the dancers would roll away to the edges of the road. Sometimes this movement didn’t happen soon enough and impatient taxi drivers, faces in a scowl, would hoot.
Reflecting on this production, Pesa said he was intrigued by the debate about spaces and noted that most ceremonies (circumcision, church gatherings) weren’t conducted in enclosed spaces but “out there”. He argues that working away from the theatre allows one to deal with a space and its challenges in novel ways.
“Being in the theatre and [working] outside, what does it mean? I don’t have an explanation. I am still exploring these alternative spaces and what they mean. In the theatre you have got these walls, but after working there for 20 years everything becomes safe,” he said, questioning: “What other things can you bring that enlarge the walls?”
Pesa said that as a dancer and choreographer working away from the safe theatre space presents a different set of challenges. “How do I respond on a hard surface? It makes me understand how the body works.”
Sadie concurs, pointing out that in certain instances the space is as vital as the performers themselves.
This is especially true of Inhabitants, a production whose force is derived from its setting.
This work, part of the Goethe-Institut’s Über(W)unden Art in Troubled Times project, will show at the Old Johannesburg Stock Exchange building in Newtown on September 10 and 11 at 5pm