MOFFIE

Grahamstown: July 5, 2012 – Review by Sifiso Sikhakhane

The much anticipated Moffie is finally in town.

Half an hour before the show, audience members congregated outside Alec Mullins, buzzing with excitement as they waited patiently to see Bailey Snyman’s new work.

Snyman being this year’s Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner for dance, I could not wait to see what this gem of a choreographer had produced.

Finally, doors opened and we all moved in slowly inside the venue, walking past the most exquisite set I’ve ever seen (… well - besides Greg King’s designs) to find our seats. My goodness, now I was convinced that I was in for a treat! The clock kept on ticking and people kept on pouring in.

Twenty five minutes later, my colleague and I prepared ourselves in dismay for the fact that we might miss Steven Cohen’s The Cradle of Humankind which was showing just after Moffie. Eventually it all began; seven dancers including Snyman walked onto the stage in black costumes which epitomized military training attire and the squad seemed ready for action.

Starting off with a bit of (…a bit? Perhaps not quite) smooching between men and men and vice versa, none of us in the auditorium seemed surprised as the title of the piece says it all. The smooching transformed into very picturesque duets; the dancers moving elegantly through Carol Preston’s excellent lighting design, leaving the audience deeply moved by the choreographer’s message.

In creating an adaptation of Andre Carl van der Merwe’s novel of the same title, Bailey used intertexuality to relay the message of a white South African male who struggles with homosexuality in a military scenario. With text, dance and music being his major instruments in the piece, we experience a broken relationship between a mother and her son, betrayal between two lovers and a battle for acceptance in a world where homosexuality still remains an issue.

I felt Bailey became too experimental with his use of outside elements (debates in the United States and American folk songs) as I failed to comprehend how this fitted in with issues of being gay in a South African military context.

I also had issues with the sound quality which sometimes left me failing to hear what was being said in the recordings. To comment on the style of choreography in the military training scenes, I felt that the style was there but not as rigid. However, it can be said that the piece managed to remain thought-provoking and was aesthetically very pleasing.

Moffie was presented at this year’s National Arts Festival Main programme by the Matchbox Theatre Collective in association with the National Arts Festival. - Sifiso Sikhakhane

(Congratulations are due to the choreographer and the dancers for presenting a superb dance piece although I have to agree with the reviewer that the work did move outside the advertised parameters. Editor)