Context helps to make a connection
IKNEWI had watched Red Earth back in 2006, but only after I watched Red Earth Revisited this year, did I start remembering what the original play felt like. The puppets are the same, and the staging had the same basic idea, it’s just now there were more people on the stage, and the music was more African.
But, there was also a different, more familiar feel to this work because there was less of an emphasis on the stork (with his feet on both the African and European continents) narrating the story with his agenda.
Now it was more of a question about whether this girl, Nongqawuse, might have been misled. But, more importantly, why this myth, now so shrouded by time and the miss-remembered facts it’s wallowed in, is more a warning to question the status quo when you think you are being taken for a ride. Look to the future, says this version, rather than feel sorry about the past.
This children’s play, plus several other works at this year’s National Arts Festival, made me wonder if you really have to know a performance’s history and everything about its context to enjoy it. The kids at Red Earth Revisited had never seen the first version, but enjoyed the second offering all the same.
Not everyone watching We Didn’t Come to Hell for the Croissants: 7 Deadly New Stories for Consenting Adults knew what the Japanese storytelling tradition of kamishibai is, but that didn’t stop people from loving the macabre sleaze, committed performances and tassel-twirling by Jemma Khan and Roberto Pombo. But, then there was the Chinese puppetry from Guangdong Puppet Art Theatre. If their artistic director had not – via an interpreter – actually explained either the origin or meaning of the sometimes abstract pieces, it would have been a bewildering experience.
(The four adolescents in front of me proved the point because they were playing on their cellphones the whole time and talked through the artistic director’s explanations, so they became more and more bored and eventually slipped out of the theatre.) Instead, we learnt a little about Chinese culture and were seriously impressed by the skills of the puppeteers, who are performers in their own right, at the same time that they manipulate their gorgeously costumed puppets.
Or how about the physical performance piece, Hanamichi, which created beautiful imagery but was difficult to understand unless you knew it was referencing a certain poem. Which I only found out long after the fact. Then again, the Standard Bank Young Artist for Dance, Luyanda Sidiya (see interview), only had his performers speak in Zulu during Siva and most of those watching it did not understand the spoken words. But, what they did get was the emotion Sidiya was trying to evoke.As long as a piece evokes an emotional response – positive or negative – it works, but it would seem the depth to which you remember the work long after might just depend on how much detail and context you had about the piece in the first place. THE NUMBER “7” is a divine one to many cultures, so Luyanda Sidiya titled his new work Siva “to talk about the different paths people take, the different vices in people’s lives.” Yet, when the audience sat down for Siva’s premiere at the National Arts Festival, observant festinos noted seven stripes starting downstage growing into eight paths upstage.
Sidiya said: “It was a way to say: ‘Are we that obvious, that it has to be seven? Maybe there is another pathway we haven’t found yet.”
With Siva, the Standard Bank Young Artist for Dance and his dancers interrogate what it is that humans want from life. Drawing on different creation myths and movement associated with various religions, the choreographer created Siva to show how we constantly seek guidance on how to be complete. He questions why we search for this connectedness in things, but forget about our relationships with people. As with previous works, Sidiya explores the spiritual connection between humans.
“Language is not a barrier, because we speak the same language of feeling… I invoke a certain feeling and that is something that only human beings can do. It is that consciousness that drives our work,” said Sidiya about Vuyani Dance Theatre.
After much research, he worked with the 10 dancers for two weeks before bringing in the musicians to spend almost a month with them: “There has to be a marriage between music and dance,” he described the process.
Sidiya also worked with Gerard Bester as dramaturge, using their differences of opinion around issues like religion and culture to push himself to be clearer about what he wanted to say: “When I create a work, I don’t create a work that will just please Luyanda and South Africa, it must work for the global village. That is why it is always important to research what is the other person’s point of view. I’m happy to have Gerard question what I do,” explained Sidiya.
While they won’t be at the 969 Festival in Joburg, Siva will travel. Jerry Mofokeng of Pacofs has requested they attend a festival in the Free State next month and James Ngcobo had booked them for the Market Theatre.
An invitation that also predates their NAF performance will be Siva’s international debut in November at a festival in Beijing. During a performance of Umnikelo in New York last year, Sidiya sat next to a woman who turned out to be an artistic director who invited them to perform in China.
“They wanted Umnikelo and she asked: ‘Do you have another work you can share with us, we just loved what we saw?’ said Sidiya. When he told her about Siva she agreed to host it, sight unseen.