DANCING FEAT
As mostly academics met to talk up the potential of the arts to create jobs, two key platforms — Gauteng Opera and the much-loved Dance Umbrella — announced that this would be their last season
‘Put your heart under your feet . . . and walk’, choreographed and performed by Steven Cohen. It was part of the annual Dance Umbrella festival that runs to March 18 at venues across Johannesburg. This is the 30th edition of the festival, which celebrates South African contemporary choreography and dance.
There was nothing out of the ordinary at the opening of South Africa’s Dance Umbrella on Tuesday night. Not until the contemporary dance festival’s artistic director, Georgina Thomson, stood on stage to make a speech.
Thomson began with the tale of a card with a picture of a ballerina on it that she received for her seventh birthday. As a child growing up in Thaba ’Nchu in the Free State, said Thomson, she had never before seen such an exquisite creature.
Then came the shocker: “After the past five-year [financial] struggle to keep going, my backbone has withered somewhat, and tonight I officially announce that this 30th edition of Dance Umbrella is the final one.”
The rest could barely be heard. It was, as arts critic and academic Robyn Sassen wrote in her blog, My View, “a night filled with gasps”, both at the announcement and the performance that followed.
Tellingly, this was work performed by two dancer-choreographers — Gregory Vuyani Maqoma and Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe — who now travel the world as famous performers thanks to the existence of the Dance Umbrella platform.
One of those gasping in the audience was singer Phenye Modiane. The news hit him particularly hard because only the day before, Gauteng Opera — which he has been part of for six years as a tenor and most recently as artistic director — announced it was closing its doors after 19 years.
“I was shattered all over again,” said Modiane. “All the opportunities that were created for artists are becoming slimmer and slimmer. There are no more opportunities in South Africa for singers and dancers. It’s very sad.”
Angry and let down
The rest of Tuesday night’s audience were not merely sad. They were angry and letdown and boy did they bitch, both after the performance and later on social media. How dare Thomson make that decision without consulting the dance community? Why did she not have a succession plan?
“The announcement to close shop is highly personal and not strategic,” Maqoma wrote on Facebook. Thomson retorted: “I am not the Dance Umbrella. The South African dance community is. I have been speaking for at least four years about the potential demise of Dance Umbrella and not one person from the dance industry has come forward to say, ‘Let’s see what we can do.’ In the end there was no choice and as someone who has worked on it for 24 years, I have the right to make the decision as nobody cared or started a conversation.”
As for succession, her request to the National Lotteries Commission for R8.5million in funding this year included provision for an associate artistic director. But Thomson received only R2.6-million, which became the cost of his year’s event. “It had to,” she said. “It was all the money I had.”
For 19 years, FNB was the primary sponsor. Then the umbrella aligned itself with the City of Johannesburg’s annual Arts Alive festival, a sponsorship Thomson augmented with other state funding.
Foreign embassies assisted in bringing out South African dancers now living in other countries, a partnership that the Market Theatre’s Ismail Mahomed declared on Facebook made Dance Umbrella “one of the strongest platforms for international cultural diplomacy. There is hardly any arts genre in South Africa that can claim to have achieved the same level of continuous international cultural exchange that Dance Umbrella has sustained since the lifting of the cultural boycott.”
Mahomed went on to list some of the dancers who had “more than danced on the international stages. They have represented the spirit and the vibrant pulse of South African society. They have been passionate and powerful cultural ambassadors for the South African nation. They are Brand South Africa.”
Dance Umbrella might not have money but it, too, has brand value. It represents a brand that members of the dance community, no matter how splintered, feel they own. It gave them opportunities, and is something they believe must exist to provide the same opportunities for others.
‘Meet in reality’
To audiences, the Dance Umbrella festivals were a chance to see things being done on stage that were often unexpected, sometimes beautiful. Top international companies were showcased as, increasingly, were the homecoming performances of South Africa’s stars living and dancing abroad. Most special of all, thanks to the diversity of offerings, was the magic of seeing South African realities resonated onstage.
Perhaps Thomson needed to target corporate sponsorship more strategically — but Gauteng Opera scored well on that front with funding from the likes of Sappi, the Royal Bafokeng Trust and the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, and it didn’t help in the end.
Meanwhile Cape Town Opera has downsized significantly, leaving opera lovers wondering whether it will make its 20th anniversary next year.
To someone like Mike van Graan, playwright and president of the African Cultural Policy Network, it’s not a crisis, it’s just par for the course, and the creative sector will continue regardless.
“It’s simply ongoing testimony to the absence of vision, and how out of touch those with policy and funding responsibilities actually are,” he said.
Ironically, in the week of the two shock announcements, the government was holding a conference on economic development and the arts. Billed as a project of the Department of Arts and Culture, the South African Cultural Observatory’s 2018 international conference in Port Elizabeth on Wednesday and Thursday aimed to interrogate “the growing potential of the creative and cultural industries”.
The facts and figures show the arts can contribute to economic growth. Reality is something else. It is too soon to know if Dance Umbrella and Gauteng Opera can be resuscitated, but as performance artist Steven Cohen stated on Facebook: “We let our magic tortoise go! It’s up to us to do what we can to find it, or to adopt and rear a new one. And ffs, if you think the business sector or the Department of Arts and Culture is going to initiate anything useful, take a trip back from planet zonk and let’s meet in reality.”