Tatham Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg:
SOMEONE is weeping. You hear sobs, sniffles, the usual noises. Soon, though, the whimpering grows more elaborate, lengthening into song. The sound is beautiful and strange, yet perhaps the oddest thing about it is how a few notes sound familiar, as does the rhythm of a drum that softly joins in. Is this wailing person sampling Ravel’s Boléro?
He is. Which is less surprising if you know the name of this production:
Still, this is no ordinary
Ravel’s relentless orchestral crescendo has been rearranged in the South African style called isicathamiya, the a cappella song-and-dance form popularised by groups like Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
The whole production is South African. It borrows the first part of its title, and the character of a professional mourner, from a South African novel (Cion by Zakes Mda). But rather than telling a story, it functions as a danced requiem, one of stylised violence and choppily articulated motion reminiscent of hip-hop popping and locking.
The show, in other words, is idiosyncratic: in its conception and form, in its borrowings from Western and South African culture. That very idiosyncrasy is what makes it typical for the artist who conceived it, choreographer Gregory Maqoma.
In South Africa, Maqoma has long been a leader in contemporary dance. His company, Vuyani Dance Theatre, celebrated its 20th anniversary last year and fills large venues. But apart from a 2013 performance of his solo Exit/Exist, his award-winning work hasn’t been seen much in New York.
Recently, that’s been changing. In 2018, Maqoma appeared in William Kentridge’s historical pageant The Head and the Load, which he choreographed; and Vuyani performed an excerpt from his Rise in last year’s Fall for Dance Festival.
Boléro, which has its US premiere at the Joyce Theater, this week as part of the Prototype Festival, is his first fulllength ensemble work to tour here. (It heads next to the Kennedy Center in Washington and Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts).
What is distinctive about Maqoma’s choreography? “He has coherently brought classical African dance into conversation with all that is contemporary,” said Jay Pather, an associate professor and curator at the University of Cape Town.
By “classical African dance”, Pather explained, he meant what is often called “traditional”: long-established practices of Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho people, “rituals and codes that are highly complex and have been passed on in highly sophisticated ways.”
Maqoma, who is of Xhosa descent, doesn’t deconstruct these rituals and codes. He uses them to tell contemporary stories.
That, in a sense, was his goal when he founded Vuyani Dance Theatre. (Vuyani, his Xhosa name, means “joy”.)
Born in Johannesburg in 1973, Maqoma was 9 or 10 when first exposed to traditional dance. In his segregated township, Soweto, he lived near a hostel for migrants who worked in factories and mines.
“I would watch them dance their traditional forms, fascinated by their bodies and sweat,” he recalled in a phone interview. “It was only later that I realised that movement was a survival mode for them, a way of dealing with their displacement and staying in touch with their old homes and the people they left behind.”
By the time he was 17, Maqoma was performing with an informal youth group, the Joy Dancers. In a newspaper, he found an ad offering training to disadvantaged youth, an announcement of auditions for the trailblazing organisation Moving Into Dance Mophatong.
“I was used to dancing in the backyard, in the dust,” he recalled. “This was my first time walking into a studio that had mirrors and a dance floor, the first time I was in the same room with people who were white and coloured who were fighting for the same position.”
He had persuaded his friend Vincent
Mantsoe to join him.
“We saw all these white people stretching in leotards,” Mantsoe said over the phone from France, where he now lives.
“And we were like, ‘Maybe we don’t belong here.’ But we saw a few other black people, so we stayed to try our luck.”
Both were accepted into the training programme, and then into the professional company, which worked in an Afro-fusion style developed by its founder, Sylvia Glasser, combining African dance with Western contemporary forms.
In a few years, Mantsoe became associate artistic director and a choreographer, winning awards in South Africa and France. Maqoma dropped out, thinking he might become an architect, but Mantsoe convinced him to rejoin for tours of Europe.
These tours, along with a 1997 scholarship to a choreographic workshop at DanceWeb in Vienna, opened his mind to new possibilities. He recalls choreographer Emio Greco encouraging him to “push more” and introducing him to improvisation. “That’s now my starting point for every creation,” he said. |