National Arts Festival, Grahamstown 2007, Part Six

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This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

14th July 2007

View online here


Bending (the masculine) gender

What does it mean to be a man in twenty-first century South Africa? – a question posed and, to some degree, answered by a number of artists at this year’s National Arts Festival. 

Three Men in a Square Space, brought to Grahamstown by the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Flatfoot Dance Company, was a production aiming to provide “an intimate view” into the lives of dancers Sifiso Kitsona Khumalo, S’fiso Magesh Ngcobo and Nkululeko Ntombela, offering “a deeply personal challenge to the ideas and beliefs that many of us share around contemporary men”. That us is an interesting pronoun, perhaps anticipating a predominantly female audience, which would mean that the production is, in one sense, an attempt to ‘explain’ men or to present them in a more complex way than popular culture usually allows.

Alternatively, Three Men in a Square Space could be seen as an address from men to men (although chief choreographer and Flatfoot artistic director Lliane Loots is a woman), probing the uncomfortable terrain between “violence and unspoken aggression” on the one hand and homo-eroticism on the other. Video inserts provided biographical mini-narratives of each dancer, relating the abstract setting of the “square space” to the very real worlds of shebeen, township and seascape while the trio intertwined their bare torsos or moved separately but synchronically.

Fresh II, a site-specific collaboration by various dancers in the warren of rooms, corridors and courtyards that is the Glennie Festival Centre, also included various evocations of gender identity. In “Disturbance of the Inner Ear”, Sizwe Zulu performed a live video projection from another room in which he mimicked a boxer warming up while his recorded voice-over declared, “I am the Oscar of my Wilde, I am the Sylvester of my Rocky” and other paradoxical statements, before stripping naked and dancing to the mournful tune of a cello. Dada Masilo’s “My Butt, the World and other Round Things” began with a clichéd, quasi-feminist diatribe about high heels, wigs and sexist slang that undermined the frenzied eloquence of her subsequent dance piece.

The other contributions to Fresh II formed a mixed bag. Shaun Acker’s “A Part to Connect” was sheer delight, combing elements of trapeze with his own musical composition to affirm the remarkable capacity of the human body; as Acker asks, “How can you try to fix the world if you can’t even understand how you fit together?” S’phelele Nzama’s Umphafa was equally successful in blending traditional African music styles with a danced tribute to his late brother – shaman-like, Nzama re-enacted the mourning ritual by which the soul of the dead one finds the symbolic umphafa tree. Slightly more difficult to digest, but no less inventive, were Leila Anderson and Chuma Sopotela’s “Shlof Shoyn Mayn Kind”, which resonated with images of the holocaust; Dinkie Sithole’s tap-based “The Red Carpet” (in which audiences were encouraged to listen to the rhythms of urban noise rather than watch the dancing); and Ruth Sacks’ “High Tea at the Plaza”, which places each audience member in the role of a conqueror as they are invited to choose and consume a ‘country’ from a cake with a world map drawn on it.

Acty Tang’s Chaste, an adaptation of Wilde’s play Salome, tackled the problem of being “a gay boy” along with the generally problematic “faithlessness of post-modern sexual identities” – but the show was so popular that this reviewer, for one, was unable to secure a ticket.

It would not be fair to say that Juliet Jenkins’ The Boy Who Fell from the Roof is ‘about’ a young man coming to terms with (and learning to celebrate) his homosexuality, for the play is about much more than that: friendship, adolescence, racism, sexism, motherhood, grief and the nature of ‘fateful’ or ‘tragic’ events. The play has run to great acclaim around the country, and it is easy to see why; the cast, under the direction of Roy Sargeant, has paid careful attention to every nuance of Jenkins’ witty, invigorating and often poignant text. Frances Marek was the delightful narrator who gives one the impression she is making the story up as she goes along; Francesco Nassimbeni was the likeably angsty protagonist Simon, whose death is the central event in the play; David Johnston was his gentle, older boyfriend; Alex Halligey, his ‘girlfriend’ and best friend Georgina; and Adrienne Pearce, his widowed mother who, having lost her son, speaks one of the play’s beautifully sad lines: “Why is there no word in English for a parent whose child has died?”

Lorraine Knox and Dani Marais’ Prodigal presents a different ‘case study’ of how the life of a promising young man can easily turn into a tragedy. Tim Redpath plays Luke, a teenager who – in an updated version of the prodigal son story – leaves the rural Eastern Cape for Johannesburg, squanders his family fortune and falls on hard times. The biblical parable is inverted, however, because all does not end well. Although Luke returns to the homestead, his father is not there to great him; he has gone to the big city to find his son, only to be killed by a group of gangsters lying in wait for ‘the prodigal’. The play, which returned to Grahamstown after a highly successful premier last year, is yet another example of the wealth of young talent in South African theatre.

Louw Venter’s Out of Time imagines a young father who has been killed in an accident but has the chance to express, in a liminal after-life space, the parting thoughts he desperately wants to communicate to his young son. In a moving performance that is quite the opposite of what followers of The Most Amazing Show would expect, Venter’s character rages against his untimely death, bemoans his separation from wife and child, and in doing so recalls his own upbringing with a brooding nostalgia. 

The travails of older South African males were also made manifest onstage at the festival. I went to Silent Voices expecting a play about “a man who is severely abused by his wife”; the blurb went on to describe how “he tries to lay charges of assault against her” but is dismissed for making such a ridiculous claim. Intrigued by this hypothesis – that women can and do abuse men – I was, initially, disappointed to discover that the plot had changed. What the audience was presented with instead was a policeman who, stressful though his job may be, and sympathetic though we may be about his recourse to brandy for relief, nevertheless deserves the haranguing of his wife because he has taken on a mistress. Their lovechild has died, and he is forced to use money that should have gone towards his first daughter’s education in order to pay for the funeral.

Buwa: the Musical depicted more unfortunate male protagonists: “an ex-miner is ill-treated by his wife for not being able to provide ... a teenager is repeatedly molested by his aunt ... a young aspiring dancer is forced to make a living teasing older men ... ‘all because of women’.” Like Silent Voices, Buwa evinces the economic strain under which most households in South Africa operate, which is often either a causal or an aggravating factor when it comes to domestic hostility – across the gender barrier.

Finally, there was Paul Slabolepszy’s latest one-man effort, Not the Big Easy. There were any number of shows at the festival about the 2010 World Cup, but Slabolepszy is well established as the king of ‘theatre about sport’ and, over the years, he has adeptly merged the two worlds (and their otherwise typically divergent audiences). In Not the Big Easy, what begins as a light-hearted take on the infuriating addiction that is golf – while Ernie Evans, who is older and infinitely worse at the game than his famous namesake, looks hopelessly for a lost ball – develops into a sustained meditation on what it means to be an ‘average’ middle-aged white South African male coping with divorce, frustrated career ambitions and unhealthy drinking habits.
 
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