This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

11th July 2009

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Among the many idiotic things that Springbok coach Pieter De Villiers has said recently, perhaps the least appropriate is his comparison of rugby and dancing as “contact sports” – for while the Boks’ series victory over the Lions was marred by dirty play, there is no such taint attached to South African dance and physical theatre. Certainly, if the productions that have by turns delighted, confounded and affected audiences at the National Arts Festival are anything to go by, we can be unequivocally proud of our dancers.

The boundaries between physical theatre and dance are blurred; performers’ self-categorisations are often the only guide in distinguishing between the two forms. What is clear, as one of the characters in Richard Antrobus’s Stilted points out, is that no actor can afford to neglect his or her movement skills: “Gone are the days of the talking head”.

Stilted, directed by Andrew Buckland, is a master class in theatre-making that adroitly fuses clowning and the kind of theorising in which undergraduate Drama students are immersed. Chris Fisher plays an aspiring Actor (yes, with a capital A – he’s earnest about his craft) who is grappling with lines from the famous “Seven Ages of Man” speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players...”

He is interrupted by Antrobus, who appears on stilts and delivers the standard clowning gags: balloons, juggling, slapstick comedy. The apparent ineptitude of this ‘giant’, like his unwillingness to be on stage, is belied by some expert acrobatics culminating in a trampolining routine that leaves audience members gasping.

If Fisher’s character learns that a performance doesn’t have to be serious to have substance – that, in an absurd world, silliness and play are inherently valuable because they fill an existential void – Antrobus’s character must meet the challenge of performing without gimmicks or ‘crutches’ (his stilts).

There are thus philosophical ramifications to this light-hearted (and often exhilarating) movement piece, as well as reflections on the material conditions of theatre-making: no actor wants to be out of work, but taking the stage often involves a limitation of freedom – he or she can no longer act with complete autonomy.

These dilemmas are also addressed in Isabella, a companion piece to Scott Sparrow’s Performer’s Travel Guide in which Sparrow teams up with Leila Anderson (under Rob van Vuuren’s direction) to probe the darker corners of theatre practice.

Sebastian is a haggard actor-cum-dancer, held captive by a disembodied voice brooding over the Graveyard Theatre. Unable to leave the stage, he is forced to ‘steal’ dances from other performers, who are lured to the theatre and an untimely death. But when he meets Isabella, Sebastian is forced to choose between his survival instinct as a thespian – ‘Dance or die’ – and his capacity to love.

A seamless blend of comedy and tragedy, Isabella is a tender portrait of a relationship bound by meta-theatrical reflections.

Altogether different in tone and scale is Dada Masilo’s ambitious, Flamenco-infused contemporary dance version of Carmen. After the runaway success of her adaptation of Romeo and Juliet at last year’s festival, Masilo’s interpretation of the narrative, characterisation and musical arrangement of Bizet’s famous opera has been highly anticipated.

The choreography of this Dance Factory production reflects the brash, hot-blooded, bull-fighting milieu in which the story plays out – it is marked by anger, antagonism and adrenaline. Masilo dances the part of the capricious title character; her distinctive frame, both powerfully muscular and gracefully feminine, sways and gyrates by turns as she plays the seductress, the faithless lover and the murder victim.

Tenderness and sorrow offset the predominant violence, passion and bawdry. Indeed, this is a production that identifies the story’s real tragic heroine as Micaela, who loses her betrothed Don Jose to Carmen’s wiles. In an agonising scene, Micaela throws herself desperately and repeatedly at Jose, only to be rebuffed each time; and in the closing tableau, she stands silently over his dead body.

There are lyrical, invigorating moments in Carmen when the ensemble dancing reaches a bold, synchronised climax to match Bizet’s strident composition – but this is also a piece in which the dancers communicate through deliberately disjointed and stilted movements.

Evocations of brokenness and rupture underlie Jay Pather’s Body of Evidence, which seeks to examine the violence that has been visited on South African bodies (and consequently on South Africa’s body politic). Pather writes that his work “considers the enduring and perpetual containment of memories of violence in our bones”, but despite the continuity offered by projections from Henry Gray’s famous anatomy textbook – which act as a reminder of the fragile parts of which the dancers’ remarkably agile bodies are comprised – Body of Evidence is a piece that will baffle those seeking to ‘connect the dots’ between its fragmented components.

It is, nevertheless, a visually striking work. Richly suggestive costuming and props locate its South African subjects at the intersection of imperial (‘European’) and indigenous (‘African’) culture and history. Unexpectedly, objects such as geraniums become symbols of the colonial project; their beauty is counterpointed by the cruel twin legacies of colonisation and apartheid.

An array of portable and mounted lighting, along with the intriguing use of perspective (audience members are frequently displaced – now looking below their feet, now up at a stage, now straight ahead), keeps the eye guessing and the mind intrigued. Ultimately, Body of Evidence provokes questions but provides few answers: as Pather notes, when the body dances its truth is “sporadic” at best and usually “calcified and submerged in inner recesses”. Dance and physical theatre can challenge and stimulate but, more often than not, they resist resolution.