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Dance me to the edge of time

Robyn Sassen
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DANGEROUS gazes: Jokanaan (Revil Yon), centre, in white, is embraced by the society, in Dada Masilo’s Salome, part of Scarcity, Joburg Ballet’s mixed bill. Photograph by Lauge Sorensen.

IT WAS THE late Alan Crump, Chairman of the National Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown, during the 1990s, who used to quip about the so-called “blue rinse and boiling sweet brigade”, who the festival organisers had to take seriously because they represented a money backbone of the festival in ticket sales. They were the country’s opulent elderly white ladies who only came to the festival for predictable, traditional events like the ballet and paid good money to see it. It wasn’t your ‘contemporary dance’ shenanigans which were considered ugly and difficult, but rather, European fairy tales and the like, cast into tutus and tights, with happy endings for beautiful swans.  

The boiling sweet brigade is no longer a force to be reckoned with. But you can’t throw out the baby with the proverbial bath water, and those European ballets still have their place in the world. But so does the rule breaking scariness of contemporary dance. Joburg Ballet has commissioned sharp young choreographers to make individual pieces, in a bid to welcome a plethora of different audiences, with a mixed bill of dance works. While every piece on stage in Scarcity, may not be your cup of tea, the initiative is exciting and important.

And it really does depend on what part of ballet can sway you – in the case of Craig Pedro’s Ukukhanya Kwenyanga: A Moonlight Waltz, classical ballet tropes and excerpts are hard and fast and recognisable. The work is pretty and watchable and the beaded aspects of the otherwise expected tutus and tights seem to be the nod in a direction of South Africa aesthetics that makes this work fit in with conservative dance tastes, without standing on too many toes. Opening the programme, it’s like a fabulous breath of fresh air.

It’s followed by Jorge Pérez Martínez’s Azul, which offers guest performer Kitty Phetla some extraordinary solo moments. Above all, it’s a work coloured in frond-like hues of greens and blues. Good on the eye, easy on the soul, as is the Latin-evocative music upon which it is danced.

And The Void, by Hannah Ma is heavy on the drama, but light on readable narrative. Danced to the ‘white noise’ sound that you may recognise from contemporary dance fashions from the 20-teens, it’s about society and resistance, group dynamics and individual messiness. Costumes are bold and aggressive; the work offers a perplexing view of how it all fits together. Life, the universe and everything, that is.

Dada Masilo’s Salome is, however, the bill’s unequivocal cherry on top. It’s worth waiting for, in its clarity of story, its containment and its reflection on passion and the fragility life. Masilo, a well-respected choreographer who is not afraid to take traditional narrative and make it her own, whatever it takes, brings her own dance language to Joburg Ballet’s dancers, forging and forcing a blood-curdling passion, which blends biblical story with sexual tension. The work beautifully brings together different styles of soundscapes, but is sparse it in use of bells and whistles by way of lighting. Rather, it is the grouping of dancers, and the structure of story which holds the work tight.

Picture the scene in Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek, where a widow is persecuted by male villagers. It’s a literary reference, horrifying in the ominous swirls that loom slow and definite and ultimately fatal. Masilo creates this kind of social vortex between her Jokanaan (John the Baptist), danced by Revil Yon in the version of the work upon which this review is premised, and the community. It’s social, it’s threatening, and with the colouration of the work and its costumes, it’s as beautiful as the unfolding of a black flower to reveal a white stamen. But above all, it’s deeply unsettling. This is the premise for her magnificent piece.

Ballet is a strange medium. Almost clinical in its structures and patterns, its hierarchies and traditional repertoires, it’s recognised as one of the toughest forms of dance there is, for the dancer’s physique. It takes dancer/choreographers of the ilk of Masilo to push those traditions hard into not only the possibilities of physique and stamina, but those of drama and story-telling, too, raising the odds of an audience’s reason to hold onto the focus of the material.

Scarcity is a mixed bill which opens new vistas for Joburg Ballet, a company that is now in its 30th year.  The design of its logo offers strange ambiguity to the reading of the production. Is it scar city or about scarcity? Both, and neither, in different ways.

For one thing, the use of piped music remains a saddening feature in an initiative which has been so carefully put together. Is the music not live because of the cost of an orchestra? Can you imagine if a production as worthy as this, could have been masterminded to work with music scores transposed for a quartet of instruments on stage, for instance? The shell of the Nelson Mandela Theatre is generous and robust enough to contain the tape-recorded music and present it without distortions, but there’s a lack of human presence in the music of each of the dance works, which hurts how they are able to touch you, as a human being.

Either way, Joburg Ballet is making healthy wrinkles in a pristine set of time hewn traditions. They’re not dropping their Sleeping Beauty or La Traviata-type works which dot the rest of their calendar, but are making ballet, their dancers and their repertoire that much friendlier, that much more palatable.

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