(Nosiphiwo
Samente & Fana Tshabala in Cargo Precious)
The 40th National Arts Festival
will be held in Grahamstown from July 3 to 13. The programme offers an awe-inspiring
number of events across the arts. Herewith information on the Main Festival’s Dance
programme:
BRUISING: Carving out a unique place
between the disciplines of dance and theatre, Standard Bank Young Artist for
2014 Nicola Elliott’s work focuses on the body’s ability to tell its story,
confronting physical experience through a theatrical medium. In Bruising, she explores the dichotomy of
tensions that exist between the inner and outer worlds in our individual
notions of love. Using love as a cornerstone of the work, Bruising reflects how the body is the medium of experience and how
its reality can seem unendurable.
While the work investigates love, it also
considers the theatrical medium itself, carefully deconstructing the very form
it is using. It is this dual experience that has become a recognisable feature
of Elliott’s dance-theatre signature and will allow Bruising to satisfy the minds of audience members long after they
have left the auditorium. Choreographed and directed by Nicola Elliott from
material sourced by the performers: Vishanthi Arumugam, Athena Mazarakis, Alan
Parker, Jori Snell; Elliott will be realising the dream of bringing together a
group of unique individuals for a sceptical, comical, and sometimes deeply felt
investigation of what it means to feel love in all its many guises.
Nicola Elliott’s critical and curious
dance-theatre has received multiple nominations and awards. Having developed a
small but loyal following nationally, she continues to create work that is
intelligent, surprising, moving and entertaining.
CARGO: PRECIOUS: Cargo: Precious is a unique collaboration between four Standard
Bank Young Artist Award winners: director Sylvaine Strike (Theatre 2006),
choreographer PJ Sabbagha (Dance 2005 ) musician Concord Nkabinde (Jazz 2006)
and Fana Tshabalala (Dance 2013).
The Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative
teams up with performers Daniel Buckland and William Harding in this imagined
account of Saartjie Baartman’s first time at sea. The piece explores the untold
part of Saartjie Baartman extraordinary story: her time spent on the ship
between Africa and Europe after being promised a life of freedom, fame and
fortune as the subject of fascination in a travelling show called The Hottentot
Venus.
Research suggests that Saartjie was loaded
as cargo onto a ship leaving Cape Town; the only woman on board and the
property of Hendrik Cesar, a freed slave who worked for Alexander Dunlop, a
military surgeon. These men accompanied Saartjie on the journey she would not
return from alive. It’s a story that ends with her remains repatriated to South
Africa, nearly two centuries after her body had been dissected and bottled in
formaldehyde in an experiment said to have been done ‘all in the name of
science’.
RUST COLOURED SKIRT: Known for producing
socially engaged work, and his long history with Jazzart Dance Theatre, Alfred
Hinkel (awarded a Standard Bank Special Recognition Award in 2007) has returned
to his roots in the Northern Cape village of O’Kiep, exploring new means of
dance-making. A master story-teller, Hinkel has produced three works (Padonbekend, Dansmettieduiwels and SEEP) with creative and life partner
John Linden under this dispensation.
Rust
Coloured Skirt is an autobiographical consideration
of dance as a medium through which life is experienced, from the perspectives
of differing life stages. Audiences can expect a quirky and honest exploration
of things that matter, as Debbie Goodman-Bhyatt (formerly of Jazzart and Jagged
Dance) returns to the stage after 15 years, with Hinkel himself. Two youngsters
- Adelaide Majoor and Byron Klassen - playfully juxtapose their biographies
with their elders’ in a narrative which craftily interweaves their personal
stories.
WHAT DOES THE EARTH THINK IT IS?: Climate
change calls for an activism that is not elevated, ideal or abstract, but an
integrated part of everyday consciousness, located within our cultural
histories and ecologies. What does the
earth think? has as its narrative a deeply metaphoric potted history of the
colonisation of the earth – a portrayal of the nature of Nature, before an
opinion from humankind imperialises its meaning and potentially. It considers local
vs global and present vs future, through sophisticated deliberation, reflexive
engagement and aesthetic response to the urgency of self-expression. Through a
stark visual dreamscape, van Tonder creates an environment of pre-sunrise
possibility, a feeling of being in tune with earth before we can see it. Film,
projected onto the body, invites an observation of the way the world provides
evidence to this awareness.
Tossie van Tonder, aka Nobonke, is a South
African dance pioneer, psychologist and writer. Her ideas often find expression
in primal physicality, and her dance performance works at this Festival span 30
years.
20/20 VISIONS: 20/20 Visions is a repertoire of four choreographic pieces, rooted
in deeply personal histories which challenge the past, while interrogating the
present socio-political and cultural status quo. Using diverse techniques and
aesthetic approaches, the selected artists raise questions in performed vignettes
which offer true-to-life portraits, often based on personal experience. The four
works are Doors of Gold; 19 Born 76
Rebels; Dark Cell and Inkukhu Ibeke Iqanda
Doors
of Gold is a performance installation solo work by
Tebogo Munyai. It alludes to an absence. Gold skulls form a cornerstone around
the performance area. The narrative attempts to draw the audience’s attention
to the unturned stones of the history of the people who died while working
forcefully in the mines. Munyai attempts to give a voice to those for whom
there is not even a trace in any archive.
19
Born 76 Rebels: Mamela Nyamza’s choreographic piece
finds its inspiration from the 1976 student uprising against the apartheid
system by black students who rebelled against Afrikaans being taught in their
schools. The 1976-newborns were products of this period of violence,
resistance, rebellion, protest and political and physical activism. Their
oppressed mothers were victims of the violent and inhuman suffering meted out by
the government and its forces of oppression. Nyamza’s work asserts that those
in the wombs of their mothers at the time still carry the scars and wounds of
those times today – if not in a real, then definitely in a symbolic, manner.
Nyamza performs with Faniswa Yisa.
Dark
Cell: Themba Mbuli’s Dark Cell draws its inspiration and metaphors from imagery of
ex-political prisoners on Robben Island. While celebrating and commemorating
South African history, the piece is embedded in the past as a mirror of
contemporary society and a reflection of postcolonial interiority. Using props
to animate dance movements, the works aspire to take the audience on a journey
of self-confrontation/realisation. The
choreographed piece is a theatrical fusion of contemporary dance, moving
images, projected images, moving set/props, recorded text, live and
pre-recorded sounds/music which try to elaborate how the mind can be the worst
prison a person can ever have.
Inkukhu
Ibeke Iqanda; First performed at the Theater
Spektakel in Zurich in August 2013, then at the Theatre Arts Admin Collective
in Cape Town, Inkukhu ibeke iqanda is
a departure from the mainstream theatre in which Chuma Sopotela has excelled.
This piece is an experiment on sexuality, theatre and performance.
NILE: Nile is the result of a long-gestating
collaboration between French/Swiss choreographers Compagnie 7273 and American
guitarist Sir Richard Bishop. This piece aims to capture the undulating nature
of the Nile River through a striking and moving combination of dance and music.
It positions the river as a reservoir of imagination, rife with contradictions
such as permanence and metamorphosis; fecundity and desert; physicality and
spirituality.
Laurence Yadi and Nicolas Cantillon of
Compagnie 7273 received the ‘Award of the Fondation Liechti pour les Arts’ for
their production Climax in 2006 and
the Swiss Dance and Choreography Prize in 2011. In this piece, they collaborate
with American guitarist Sir Richard Bishop, an improviser and former punk who
loves the Middle East and India, and is a musician who is as great and free as
he is unclassifiable. Dancers: Luc Benard, Nicolas Cantillon, Gildas Diquero,
Lola Kervroedan, Margaux Monetti, Laurence Yadi
LE SONGE D’UNE NUIT D’ÉTÉ: Who can resist
the love-potions and possets whipped up by Michel Kelemenis; or rather, the
magic juices of his Puck? In his very personal appropriation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the French
choreographer behaves uncannily like Shakespeare’s mischievous elf. But this is
no careless Puck at work, and this is no mere sequence of Freudian slips:
Michel Kelemenis means business when he starts playfully pulling the strings of
the comic play Shakespeare had imagined as a satire of Elizabethan society. In
alluring tones, he leads his audience into a world where the marvellous and the
mysterious rub elbows with the grotesque. Le
Songe d’une nuit d’été is full of surprises: a forest with no trees or
bushes, where rude mechanicals with dramatic ambitions bump into a donkey, the
consequence of Oberon and Titania’s quarrel.
The Geneva Ballet Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set in an
enchanting place where dreams rule over – and overrule – everything. Estranged
lovers pass in the night and meet again, as the mechanicals’ band of amateur
actors opens the doors to a land of dreams. The subtle strains of Felix
Mendelssohn’s Octet merge into the exquisite orchestration of his famous stage
music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
leading us into the darkest corners of a fairy wood. Let yourselves be carried
away by the poetry of bodies moving in a universe of essential sensuality,
lightness and undisguised instincts.
William Shakespeare wrote his comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream sometime
between 1594 and 1595. In 1826, the young Felix Mendelssohn composed an
overture to the Play, and in 1843, the King of Prussia; Friedrich Wilhelm IV,
commissioned Mendelssohn to write more incidental music for the play. A Midsummer Night's Dream became part of
the classical ballet repertoire in 1876 in a version by the famous Russian
choreographer Marius Petipa. With this new setting by Michel Kelemenis and
accompanied by musical support of the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic, the Grand
Théâtre de Genève Ballet Company reaffirms its commitment to a form of dance
that interprets the great works of the ballet repertoire in a new and exciting present
tense.
Principal Dancers: Joseph Aitken (Cupid/King
of the Elves, Yu Otagaki (Fairy Queen), Geoffrey Van Dyck and Sarawanee
Tanatanit (Blue lovers), Nathanaël Marie and Daniela Zaghini (Pink lovers),
Paul Girard / Loris Bonani (Pyramus/Thisbe); and Aurélien Dougé, Natan Bouzy,
Vladimir Ippolitov (3 Thieves).
2013 EASTERN CAPE INDIGENOUS MUSIC AND
DANCE ENSEMBLE: The productions will highlight the vibrancy of the Eastern Cape
sub-tribes - amaBhaca, abaThembu, amaKhoisan, abeSuthu, amaNdiya and amaMpondo -
to display their rich music and dance heritage. This will be a potpourri of
traditional dance and music ranging from the foot-stomping of amaBhaca dance to
the animal movement of the Khoisan. Dedicated performers from each of the
sub-tribes or clans utilize this opportunity to showcase their rich diverse
indigenous music and dance, thus celebrating their political freedom.
LOVE DANCE – Exhibition: The title Love Dance is an accurate reflection of
the passion that photographer Val Adamson has for photographing dance. For
Adamson, watching dance is an exciting, engrossing experience that becomes a
lingering, evocative memory once the performance is over. Her thrilling challenge
has been to capture some of those moments and save those images for posterity,
allowing the viewer to relive the beauty of live dance.
This photographic exhibition covers almost
20 years of Dance in KZN, featuring an array of dancers from throughout Africa
representing a variety of styles and genres. It is a celebration of dance as
seen through Adamson’s lens, showcasing some of the most poignant moments and
astonishing feats of agility exemplifying the artform’s combination of
athleticism and beauty.
For more information on the National Arts
Festival click on the banner advert at the top of this page or visit
www.nationalartsfestival.co.za
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