Movement doesn’t need a thesis statement. The imagery that Transcendent shapes is unmistakeable, evocative and simple. It need not be anything more. Movement cannot lie. A single move can make you as powerful as it can make you vulnerable. And the performers beautifully hold this tension between power and vulnerability.
With direction and choreography recreated by Rusty Mowery, the show maintains a fast-paced rhythm, balancing large ensemble numbers with more intimate character-driven scenes. You’re never in doubt about what you’re getting: a Cinderella-style love story wrapped in Beverly Hills fantasy, complete with shopping montages, operatic indulgence, and sweeping emotional payoffs.
Maqoma’s work has a tendency to leave you trembling in anguish. It’s an earth shattering experience you might not be able to rationally find the vocabulary to describe. How could it be possible to say so much with just music and movement? Genesis may take you deeper you believe possible.
Ramsay is utterly formidable in this role, which brings out an immense yet delicate sense of nobility coupled with almost crippling vulnerability, and all hidden beneath the tight facade. With a profile rendered regal and indomitable by an astonishing a wig, Ramsay paints a Callas fearless, cruel, funny, irrepressibly human.
The text is penned by people much younger than Homer, which presents a flattening of the old narratives, and a simplifying of them into platitudes of anger that sees the bashing up of guys perceived to be worthy of a good bashing up, or better still, a very violent death.
Featuring phenomenal performances by Alice Findlay, Oratile Manamela, Nicola Shapiro and Ketsia Velaphi, it takes on the repetitive nature of a boarding school ethos, punctuated by gossip and politics, lessons which are both rote-based and morally confusing, and the drugs, sex and other illegal experiments conducted in the school’s interstices.
In terms of power she wields both as a character and a performer, Mpume Mthombeni as Nomsa is God in a pair of 1950s-evocative horn-rimmed specs and a dress appropriate to a middle-aged woman. She carries the world on her head and can invoke humility or catastrophe with a gesture.
You don’t come away complacent from this work. Is it assaultative? Absolutely. Relatable? 100%. You feel broken, body and soul as you emerge from it. You laugh with recognition at the dark tropes and you sweat with a personal dread at where this work may go, as you experience it.
With all of its apparent chaos, the story lines in Daniel Buckland’s Afropocalypse are crystal clear and the surreal topsy-turvy values articulated from the idea of an African apocalypse are held sacred and gorgeous. And not a little scary, at times. Be prepared to give tears and laughter on cue.
Gofaone Bodigelo is a Medea who is angry to the point of blindness, but she never loses her sense of being a woman wronged rather than a witch. It is, however, the chorus: 17-year-olds Natasha Dube and Malcom Moloi that leave you shattered by the sheer potency of their performances.
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