Choreographing Stories, Negotiating Difference: A Lovaffair to Remember
07 Jul 2011 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Grahamstown Festival '11, Remix Dance Company
Back in 2009, I was living – temporarily – in Germany. I craved theatre. Good theatre. A friend suggested taking me to see an adaptation of Jason and the Golden Fleece. The only catch? It was all in German. I went anyway. It was the most incredible performance I have ever seen.
Weaving a successful narrative is not just about what is said. By freeing oneself from the constraints of following every single word, one has a chance to read the actors’ bodies, the subtle signs of the staging far more attentively. There is an inherent value in learning to look again, look differently.
What is disability but a difference in body language? What is different body language but an opportunity for a new way of understanding an otherwise familiar narrative?
There is much discomfort when it comes to seeing ‘foreignness’ on stage. People do not know how to negotiate things in a different language, are easily put off. “That’s not my language, I’m not interested.” Or, perhaps, “I don’t want to see that kind of story.” It leaves them disappointed if it imperfectly resembles a (body) language they are used to. It leaves them deeply uncomfortable if it does not.
Remix – like any integrated performance company – face these challenges of reception in creating work that deliberately seeks to engage people with the relationship between difference and dance. In ‘Lovaffair’, they have succeeded in ways that are both subtly noticeable and startlingly apparent.
‘Lovaffair’ is a dance piece that is beautifully, fiercely and tenderly choreographed for able-bodied and so-called disabled dancers. It is not an approximation of able-bodied dance, or an attempt to hide difference. It is uncompromising in its vision. It will not let you look away.
Professor Victoria Marks, in a Think!Fest panel discussion spoke of tactics in integrated theatre to reveal subjectivity and story, when all the audience initially focuses on is the body of the disabled dancer. She suggested that utilising the tropes of desire, humour and an awareness (and returning) of the audience’s curious gaze all function to ensure that it is the person that is revealed by the performance, and not just the body.
Remix must have been listening, because ‘Lovaffair’ works with all three tactics. In a startling challenge, performer (and Director of Remix) Malcolm Black breaks the fourth wall to ask the audience “What did you expect? That’d we’d be able to dance like them? You mean you put down your wallet-money for this?”
The use of a harness that hoists dancers of all physical abilities, leaving them dangling, feet useless beneath them, speaks eloquently to the limits of the body. At one point, an able-bodied dancer is suspended, flailing limbs rendered useless, in a furious, mute struggle with self and limitation, body and control.
To return to my notion of integrated dance being a dialogue between different body languages, there is a beautiful moment where performers, sitting in a row, are each translating a piece of text. A line is recited in English, a second performer translates it into isiXhosa, a third into sign language. All languages convey the same basic meaning, just differently. Sometimes they can do the same thing. At other times, the possibilities are more limited – “I can’t translate that,” declares one of the performers after a particularly nuanced isiXhosa phrase. So it is, ‘Lovaffair’ suggests, with different bodies. Difference has limitations, but these do not mean they cannot function successfully, both in their own right and with others.
‘Lovaffair’ speaks eloquently of the possibilities in the space of dialogue between different body languages. It shows us, quite literally, a way to embrace the other, to see beyond the limits of our bodies, whether they are defined as disabled or not. Whether this narrative is foreign to you or not, I would urge you to go and experience it. It’s a Lovaffair to remember.
Don’t Forget to Think!Fest
07 Jul 2011 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Grahamstown Festival '11
What is disability? How do we see and represent it, both on and off the stage? What is disability’s relation to the arts?
The ‘Access/No Access’ panel discussion formed part of the Think!Fest portion of this year’s Festival and centered around the role of, and response to, integrated physical ability dance companies. This is a topic that is particularly pertinent, given the range of dance offerings (some from integrated dance companies) at his year’s festival. It is also a topic that is particularly important, considering the misunderstanding, prejudice and often open hostility that integrated dance (and, for that matter, theatre) often receives.
A panel comprising of American theatre and dance academics Victoria Marks (UCLA) and Catherine Cole (UC Berkeley), South African critic Adrienne Sichel and the Director of the UCT School of Dance Gerard Samuel gathered to discuss the resonances, complications and barriers in the intersection between disability and performance. UCT theatre academic Jay Pather was also on hand to read a contribution from Malcolm Black, the Director of integrated dance group Remix, who was unable to attend due to technical considerations for the Remix performance ‘Lovaffair’. What followed was a discussion that was thought-provoking, engaging and, at times, deeply personal. From the role of critics in establishing a language of reception of integrated performances to the tactics of choreographers in revealing subjectivity rather than simply body, the topic was explored with engaging humour and a great deal of critical thought by this panel.
The Think!fest panels, taking advantage of the wealth of thinkers, activists and researchers who flood Grahamstown at this time of year, provide a wonderful nuance to the festival experience. Think!fest – despite its name – will not be the only space at the festival where one is challenged to think and interrogate concepts. It will most definitely, however be an important space for doing so. Far from casting itself as the intellectual fringe, the Think!fest discussions draw on a wide range of topics, bringing together thinkers and activists, specialists and practitioners from all walks of life, all fields of study. Unlike more standard festival offerings, the Think!fest panels offer you the chance to engage with the experts, join the conversation, be part of the process of creation. I would love to see more people add it to their festival ‘must-see’ list.
Cairns Can Do No Wrong
06 Jul 2011 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Grahamstown Festival '11, James Cairns
It’s official: I’ll see anything James Cairns is in. The man is astoundingly talented and I can’t say enough good things about his performances. Now I can add his writing to the mix too.
Despite being happy to see Cairns even if he were reciting extracts from the OED, it was a particular pleasure to watch him perform in Sie Weiss Alles – an absolute gem of a script. Written by Cairns himself, it is nuanced, multi-layered and very, very clever.
Set at the end of World War Two, the play opens with the intriguing tableau of an intimate scene between an SS Officer and a young German woman. Faced with the certainty of an imminent and brutal death at the hands of the encroaching Russian army, fate has thrown into the captain’s interrogation room a woman from his past, brought in for questioning when her father disappears under suspicious circumstances that smack of American defection. Now, he is faced with an endgame of impossible choices. They both have nothing to lose and everything to play for. And so they begin.
The script is beautifully crafted, working on multiple levels of meaning as the pair pass the time by becoming actors in their own version of Hamlet. This act becomes a complex means of negotiating trust, of sizing up and testing boundaries. In the drama of the high stakes games they are engaging in, truth is up for grabs to the best performer.
At once witty, clever and deeply disturbing, the play is a complex, beautifully crafted expression of human need, the meaning of acting a role, the high stakes of trust. A war story with a difference, the two-hander is brought beautifully to life by the tight direction of Tamara Guhrs and riveting performances by the actors.
Cairns will blow you away with his understated desperation, his portrait of a man at the end of his rope. It would be so easy for this piece to sink into melodrama, but he paints with such nuance that one believes the character absolutely.
Whilst Taryn Bennett is unquestionably a very talented actress, her performance suffered for me due to a less-than-perfect German accent. It’s hard to hide poor accent work in a two-hander and unfortunately next to Cairns, it jarred. That being said, she carried the action well as a woman dexterously treading the line between truth and desire, safety and honesty.
Go and treat yourself to the best piece of new South African writing I’ve seen in a long time. Sie Weiss Alles is a tour de force of local talent.
FTH:K Make Their Mark With Another Hit Show
06 Jul 2011 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Craig Leo, Cristina Salvoldi, FTH:K, Grahamstown Festival '11, Rob Murray
I have many issues with ‘issue’ theatre. South Africa has a rich history of protest theatre – theatre which politicised, which incited, which educated. Post-democracy, many of these protest-era playwrights have become disillusioned: audiences today are complacent, they say. People do not care about politics anymore, preferring to see Euro-imported musicals and comedies.
I certainly have sympathy for this. But the tricky truth of the matter, I find, lies in the fact that, whilst much political or ‘issue’ theatre has a very good heart, this doesn’t always translate into good art. It ticks boxes, it sticks to safe linear narratives and obvious dialogue. It avoids nuance, ambiguity, poetry at all costs because it is driven by the mortal fear of not being understood, of not getting ‘the message’ across. It is, in short, boring.
It is so refreshing, then, to see Benchmarks – a new offering from that most poetic of companies, FTH:K. It ticks the ‘issue boxes’…and it does so with grace and an uncompromising eye for beauty.
Xenophobia, (institutionalised and social), immigration, crime, a generation of white South Africans’ sense of displacement and identity; Benchmarks is about all of these things. But Benchmarks is also about none of them. The message is there – and it’s strong – but, first and foremost, this is a story of people, of isolation and connection, of identity and belonging. It is a story of finding what is lost. It is a story of hope.
FTH:K have established a reputation for innovation in masked physical theatre work. Their trademark style is again at work here, successfully blending movement, music and mask to weave a shimmering narrative without the use of a single word. What unfolds is a Kafka-esque tale of the coming together of three individuals who are very much alone in the same city. It will satisfy those who demand their theatre to be ‘relevant’ as well as those who seek something artistically accomplished.
FTH:K always choose their collaborators with care and it shows. Everything about this production is magical. Evocative soundscapes courtesy of Brydon Bolton and Jacques Toile wrap around the audience like a blanket, Rob Murray’s subtle lighting ranges from mellow with just a hint of acid afterburn to full-blown violent immersion, Cristina Salvoldi’s simply outstanding, living masks seem to defy the immovable quality of the wood from which they are made.
Craig Leo’s set deserves a special mention. Two cupboards unfold to reveal tiny, perfect worlds, their design adaptable enough to provide makeshift wings for the actors, projection screens and the wooden equivalent of a curtain for scenes endings.
So go and watch bodies speak. Go and think. Go, quite simply, and be moved.
One Door You’d Do Well to Open
04 Jul 2011 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Baba Yaga Theatre, Grahamstown Festival '11, Ubom!
It’s always a nervy thing, going to your first show of the festival. A snoozefest might set your whole festival spiralling down into the depths, but a good work can give you that kick to go out, even when you’re too tired, too hungry or – let’s be honest here – too lazy to want to get out there and track down your next venue.
It was with some trepidation, then, that I kicked my festival off with Door. I was expecting good things – after all, UBom! and Baba Yaga theatre company have built up impressive reputations at Grahamstown. Their works consistently push physical theatre boundaries and have been equally consistent in delighting festivalgoers. Door marks a collaboration between the two companies and, I’m delighted to say, it has for the most part succeeded in marrying the strengths of both (arguably UBom!’s energetic, expressive range and Baba Yaga’s inventive visuals).
Door is billed as being “a truly thrilling collaboration…a living tableaux, a labrynth of strange events and characters.” Forget that. Go in there with a blank headspace and be prepared to have it filled with swirling scenes, chattering bodies and transformed objects. Be open to creative space. Watch as objects come alive under the sheer force if the company’s vision. Be astounded at the beauty of the everyday thing, fall in love with the exquisite, adaptable set.
Doors to me evoke spaces of liminality, a physical boundary of ‘in-betweenness’ of spaces between identities and decisions. The cast’s use of curiosity, exploration and play create a magical space for these themes to be explored at a highly allusive, irrational level.
With that being said, relax about narrative. No, really, chill out. It’s not going to be linear. It’s not going to ‘make sense’ straight away. To really get the most out of this production, I think you have to go into it ready to play. Trust the performers. Let them take you on a journey. Let them show you images that hit that back part of the brain where logic doesn’t reside (but the lyrics of every radio hit you listened to when you were at University somehow do). Watching Door was rather like gazing at those swirling eye illusion pages you used to get in magazines: everything looks mixed up for a while, but after a while, your synapses fire away and start to make small, yet rewarding connections. Threads begin to form. Before you know it, a whole story is spinning itself out before you. You just have to trust the unfolding.
Technically, the cast gave a strong ensemble performance, with some magnificent cameos given in small gestures like a captivating smile, an exasperated click of the tongue, a look of longing. I felt the second half of the show unwound somewhat – what was a tightly constructive experience began to give way to a series of moments that felt to me as if they had been afterthoughts or additions designed to showcase the cast’s range and technical skills rather than enhance the thematic content or narrative elements.These minor gripes aside, I would heartily recommend this production to anyone who enjoys physical theatre, or who is in the mood for something a little different.
So don’t panic. Don’t cling to words and rational meaning. Just…experience. Open doors in your mind and let the magic in.
