WHEN YOU STRIP things done to their bare bones, all you really have is your own body. It’s a vulnerable set of mechanisms that offer a call and response to the brickbats and broken things that always surround you and are there primarily to take you down. It’s the nature of being human in this world, it seems. Alan Parker and Gavin Krastin’s diptych performance work Heavy Metal addresses these issues with a sense of rawness and vulnerability that will leave you both shattered and empowered. It’s onstage at POPArts Theatre in Parkwood, Johannesburg, until 28 February 2026.

The work, split into two distinct pieces cleaves well together. There is a give and take between the values articulated by both performers that leaves the experience balanced. Yet you don’t come away with a sense of complacency. Assaultative? Absolutely. Relatable? 100%. You feel broken in body and soul as you emerge from the space. You laugh with recognition at some of the tropes offered and you sweat with a kind of personal dread at where this work may go, while you’re watching it.

The first part, featuring Parker armed with a metal stool, a bass guitar and his own sense of careful vulnerability, offers an understanding of the heaviness of the body. At the same time, using precise and beautiful clowning, a deadpan gaze and a brilliant understanding of the body’s core balancing capacities, he engages in a self-deprecating monologue. It harks to the beautiful vulnerability of his timeless piece Sometimes I have to lean in, with Gerard Bester, revived recently at this theatre and elsewhere.  

Krastin, in a separate space, takes you to a place which is alienating, violent and scary. The strobes are potent: they feel personal and isolating as the shafts of light seem to distinguish you from your fellow audience members. And you feel completely alone. The space is dark and tight. Hot. The dancer is dressed in a disposal jumpsuit, the kind you might wear after having experienced or perpetrated a crime involving bodily fluids. Or what you may don in the face of great unexpected spillage. The light seems to work around him, rendering him a figure of doom, armed with sjambok. And as the work evolves, and the strobes lowered, you feel your sternum relax from that flight or fight stress that the strobes bring.

And you hear Krastin’s narrative of horror and abuse he experienced at the hands of academic bureaucracy and bullying during his employ at a South African university, and how his body broke to the same tune. But this is no pity party. Invoking live flame and an understanding of physical anger that is cathartic even to you on your plastic chair in the audience, the work feels like pure assault and yet it takes you on a journey of complicity.

We live in a terrible world, where people do unthinkable things to one another. We do not learn with history. But we need to be able to pick up those splinters of our own spines and make sense of the pattern they cast in time. We need to pivot ourselves in tune to the bashing of a whip on a piece of corrugated metal in the same way as we need to hear the weeping song of a bass guitar playing itself against a pliant body.

Heavy Metal is a new work. Experimental and bold, using subtleties of body, mind and technology, it’s an important foray for both performers into untrammelled terrain and it touches chords in you in ways difficult to articulate. You emerge from the space both pummelled and anew.

But watching a work of this nature, offers a sad gloss on the dance culture that this city used to know. Dance Umbrella for 30 years was an institution which cocooned and nurtured the unabated and frightening energy of new dance works. Today, in its absence, ours is no longer a city which offers a home, even a foster home, to wildcat gestures of this nature, coming from the gut and the heart as they do.

• Heavy Metal is created and performed by Alan Parker and Gavin Krastin. It features production management by Langa Mathuthu, projection consultation by Jim O’Gorman and writing by Kirsten Harris and it performs at the POPArt Theatre in Parkwood until 28 February 2026.