Dance shows how play can be difficult and rewarding
The “travelling player” is a venerable arts tradition: actors taking shows from place to place, always ready to perform with minimal costumes, sets and props for whatever audience they find.
In times gone by, they have travelled to avoid censorship, plague and rival theatre makers. Nowadays, travelling players are arts entrepreneurs hustling in a precarious industry, turning necessity into virtue and offering audiences the thrill of a bespoke, one-off, site-specific theatrical event.
There are no better exponents of this model than Mike van Graan and Kim Blanche Adonis, who have taken their production My Fellow South Africans a few times around the country already.
This satirical one-woman revue, penned by Van Graan and performed (to much acclaim) by Adonis, has been on the boards of formal theatres but has also been staged at schools, churches, retirement villages, hotels and halls.
Despite all this coming and going, I have somehow missed the show and last week it visited my home base, the Drama Factory in Somerset West, presenting me with a dilemma. I had already committed to attending Jackï Job’s And Then ... at Artscape’s Arena Theatre in Cape Town. What to do?
I decided to head to Artscape, safe in the knowledge that My Fellow South Africans is ending the year with a twoweek run at the Baxter Theatre before Van Graan and Adonis head off into the wild blue yonder again.
And Then ... has also travelled in space and time and form, having been through multiple iterations since it opened in 2018. There are two consistent elements: Job’s dance and the piano stylings of José Dias. Their collaboration creates a unique relationship between movement and music.
At times, Dias’ playing feels like an accompaniment to the dancing. At times, one senses that it is his experimentation with the piano strings that elicits responses from Job, as if the jagged melodies are commanding her performance.
Job observes “And Then ... always reflects where I am, in my plural selves, in life”. One of these selves is a Butoh-trained contemporary dancer. She calls her Butoh mentor, Yoshito
Ohno, “my other father”; he, in turn, was the son of Kazuo Ohno, who developed the genre in post-war Japan with cofounder Tatsumi Hijikata.
Job is thus the SA inheritor of an art form known as “the dance of utter darkness ”— often macabre, absurd, grotesque and distressing, its key elements being “pain, exhaustion and death”.
Butoh is hard going. Indeed, it proved too much to bear for a couple of Job’s audience members, who fled while she was making her way with painstaking slowness down a pair of ladders from the flies to the stage. An intriguing question hung in the air. This version of And Then ... is a meditation on the praying mantis, that curious insect which, “for aeons, has been present in different cultures across the globe”. As Job twitched, shuddered and unfurled herself, I wondered if what we were watching was a kind of imitation of a praying mantis — a use of the dancer’s physical skill to convey to us “the thing in itself ”— or, given that the creature has such strong symbolic and mythological associations, if this was to be understood as anthropomorphism, merging the human consciousness with that of the praying mantis, projecting human emotions and experiences onto it.
Perhaps this is too literal a question for the mysterious ways of Butoh. As Job danced us through something like the life cycle of a praying mantis, there indeed were the essentials of the human condition — birth, reproduction and death — but also a yearning for something more: self-knowledge, connection, grief, healing, freedom.
It culminated in a sequence combining not only dance and piano but also beautiful film projection, shifts in lighting, delicate props and something like narrative conclusion, or even a cosmic experience.
In her programme note, Job expresses a desire to encourage “childlike play”, “adventure”, “compassion” and “imaginative creation” in others. At the performance I watched, she echoed this sentiment in a brief closing speech. And Then ... demonstrates that play should not only be equated with ease and fun. The occasional difficulty of playing yields rewards too — a compelling lesson in patience.
THE COLLABORATION CREATES A UNIQUE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MOVEMENT AND MUSIC