In spring 2009, I traveled to the Middle East, Zimbabwe and Uganda. The next 2 blogs will offer short pieces about two aspects of the Zimbabwe experience. By then I should have my approach to the origins of Every Country in the World Before I Die figured out—at least to the extent I’m not embarrassed to share what I’ve written.

Art Conquers All….. 

The lawn before the stage is crowded with young families in all the lovely shades of Africa and a row of elegant elderly white ladies evocative of colonial Rhodesia!

All are enjoying the risqué jokes, roping and knife-throwing directed at two men gamely providing comic foil for the stars’ suggestive remarks. I am at the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) and it is fun…and art-filled…and a respite from the worries of life under Mugabe.

Traditional, contemporary, big, small, national, international art…all here

A rare Zimbabwean wild beast

Transportation has greatly improved under Mugabe. NOT.

Harare, Zimbabwe is not high on most travel wish lists what with Mugabe, typhoid and farm-confiscations. But think again! HIFA is a brilliantly-implemented festival managing to combine a richly programmed cultural celebration with a sense of community in a city that needs all it can get of both. The festival fills Harare Gardens, a place of luxurious shade trees, meandering paths, the spicy-sweet smells of the thatched-roof food stalls, idiosyncratic art installations and baskets, beads and wood carvings of traditional Zimbabwe side by side with hip fashion accessories in the green, yellow, red and black of the flag. Lively stages showcase artists from around the world. Professional dancers, actors and musicians mingle with comedians, pop stars and wannabe’s. Festivities begin early, end late. Audiences are local and international, black and white, young and old, rich and almost-poor. HIFA is a celebration where you take a blanket and stay awhile, snack on hot dogs and sweet potato biscuits, drink South African wine and Zimbabwean beer, let the kids play in the grass and ogle the clowns. It is all reminiscent of a county fair with all manner of arts instead of giant squash and Ferris wheels.

Where it’s all happening!

So…stop with the cell phone and laptop. Let the laid-back ambience of Harare Gardens take over. With mid-morning coffee sample a fine homemade lemon sponge cake. Meander over to traditional dance and drumming, then on to a folk musician/storyteller making gentle fun of the “the old man” (which is how Zimbabweans refer to Mugabe when they can’t use more direct language). Later a South African fusion of stand-up comedy and political theater will offer a much harsher assessment. Enjoy a wine and meat pie from an outdoor tent-café with white tablecloths and candles and then, best of all, an evening of drama in the Standard Theater. The venue is basic but the performances more than compensate. I see Disconnection (family disintegration and immigration in contemporary Zimbabwe); The Crossing (braving the Limpopo River for survival in South Africa) and Allegations (an exploration of the violence that overtook both white farmers and black rural workers during the confiscations). Here is a real intersection of art and politics with Zimbabwean theater stubbornly planted in the middle of this dangerous and noisy junction. And this is one crossroads Mugabe’s thugs just can’t keep closed.

Best venue at the festival

Art festival aficionados in general, and especially those who believe that art is the most effective way to speak truth to power, should put HIFA on their calendar but keep checking the newspapers to be aware of Mugabe’s latest shenanigans.

The sign says “Life goes on even when the lights go out.” That’s life in Mugabeland.

 The Countdown Diary

March 10^th   It is only Wednesday and I don’t leave until Sunday evening. However I left home on February 11^th so it now one month away. Mentally I’m starting home.

March 11^th   Now it is Thursday afternoon and my colleagues and I have just had our last lunch together at the Coffee Bean…biltong salad and pumpkin/cashew/goat cheese risotto. I know it’s time to go home when I’d rather have a bowl of Cheerios.  Boyzie’s performance coming up. 

March 12^th   Friday am. Sleeping way too well. Need a little stress back in my life.  Boyzie’s piece last night. I love it…a distinctive, impossible to forget work of political dance-theater. Some meetings today and a last “talk” with Adrienne Sichel. We still have four performances to go…Actually more because one’s a triple bill but the main one’s I came for are over. There is still the surprise possibility of course.

 Dear Diary. Can I go home now? It’s Friday night and I just saw a performance that is not at all to my taste nor was the sausage and potato chips and beer for dinner. However I had an interesting chat with Laurent Clavel, the Director of the French Institute here, a passionate advocate for South African Dance and an equally excellent example of France’s ongoing support for contemporary dance. While it hasn’t been as vigorous under Sarkozy it still makes the US look bad bad bad in the arena of art support.

 March 13^th   Saturday Morning and a bad thing happened. Jodee and I met Adrienne Sichel in a coffeehouse bookstore and now I have more books. I need a 10-step program that deals with addictive book-purchasing behavior especially when you’re about to travel home with an already full-suitcase. But I am so enamored of Southern African literature of all sorts that I cannot stop myself. Obviously anything can be ordered on-line but you can’t easily know about this work unless you browse in an actual bookstore.

Yesterday, someone shared a FB post about how Starbucks is allowing those brave gun-toting Americans in for a power shot of something while carrying/packing heat/feeling manly. What’s Flying Stars position on pistol-packing coffee drinkers? Or is it time to switch to tea? The American gun culture—what a shameful national attribute. An African refugee told me years ago that her Minneapolis neighborhood scared her so much because of the constant sound of gunshots at night. At home, she said, “Only the police and the bad guys have guns.” Think about that comment. In the US I’ll wager most of the deaths by gun are committed by angry insecure psychotic-or-otherwise ordinary citizens who have every right by our standards to own a firearm. Stop.

Saturday Night: One last South African rain for me last night. Now home to the desert and spring dust blows. Engaged with a performing group from Reunion Island last night. Piece based on idea of dancers selling dance like prostitutes sell sex. Usually this company actually does the “performance” in the streets but festival organizers felt like that might be dangerous so they were given a way too comfortable lounge in the rather genteel atmosphere of upstairs at the Market Theater. Only ten “clients” participate per hour. A bit too low-key perhaps for anyone to relate dancers to prostitutes and the typical contemporary dance environment to a stripper/den/bar/house of ill-repute!

Stimulating talk with Boyzie, catching up on his projects. Influx Controls: I Wanna be, wanna be is now slated for several European festivals and the second piece in the trilogy: On the 12^th night of never, I will not be held black will premier in Paris in early May. Then that will tour as well, in some cases with Part 1 and in other cases on its own. The 12^th night includes Boyzie and his nephew with the addition of singer he has talked about previously. Wish there was a way to tour both together. I mentioned it and of course it is probably logistically possible but financially is surely another question. I need a quick trip to Paris to see the new piece. Oh stop it Marjorie…you need to stay home and write grants so you have money to pay the artists you love so much.

Sunday: The end of a trip. Dirty clothes packed, too many books packed, I congratulate myself on only having lost a camera case and one pair of black socks in 34 days of travel. I have a last cup of my on-the-road Nescafe and check in with my loyal laptop for any last messages—will be out of touch now for almost two days. Well there is my cell but at $2.29 a minute I do not chat lightly. I did not take my laptop to Gaborone, two nights and a day—which is what drove me to my nearly-hour of American Idol—NEVER leave home without your laptop or this could happen to you too. I will miss this cozy, convenient, quiet, quirky little Tama Rumah room in Melville, Jo’burg, SA. Anyone going to Johannesburg. Stay here.

Goodbye to Ann, a new friend, an energetic, kind and brave woman, younger than me but not so so much, who left South Africa to try Japan, teaching English for a year, and came home to start life over after years as a businesswoman, now the guesthouse manager, and William, her young assistant from Malawi, one of the world’s absolutely poorest countries, who sends money home to maintain younger siblings after the death of their mother and to support a wife and small child. He has land back home but no way to make a living on a small holding without farming equipment or money to buy fertilizers, etc. He is smart and exceedingly sweet young man who exclaims on how lucky people are to have been born in South Africa where the schools have chairs and blackboards and chalk and even some books!

A last afternoon of well-presented performances at the Dance Factory and my colleague, Jodee, and I are on our way to the Oliver Tambo (anti-apartheid leader along with Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela) Airport. Through passport control, I check my bags (because of books there are now two) and still have to carry an extra bag of book with me or I’ll be over weight limit. South Africa may have some of the world’s best book stores—not overrun with the latest trashy best-sellers from the likes of nasty-mouth blonde Republicans or celebrities-of-the-month. The ones where I fell under the book-browsers spell are full of all things southern African/African from biographies of people who’ve actually done something to poetry to literary fiction to—my favorites—the smart and surly and disenchanted but nevertheless somewhat sensitive police detectives fighting crime in neighborhoods with which I’m now familiar. Books are piled up everywhere and it just feels…well…bookish. Hey, I love all bookstores but some do seem more about reading than others.

So many books, such small suitcases

The flights—airtime around ten hours to Frankfort—maybe nine to DC—three to Albuquerque. Don’t eat, take a pill, doze…it’s cold in Albuquerque, my son picks me up with latest family news and I’m soon home. The urge to travel will now lie dormant for up to two months…

 Southern African Dance and Theatre

I am so lucky. A big chunk of South Africa time. I do love this country. My every-country-in-the-world-before-I-die strategy has to incorporate some extended time in special places—such as South Africa. I hope to do the same in Brazil and maybe in Russia, maybe in Australia. Vast spaces, multi-racial/cultural in very different ways—troubled, rich, big bad histories, personalities, sources of wealth. Oh for god sake Marjorie, stop planning the next trip before you’ve even stopped for milk on the way home from the airport and washed this trip’s laundry.

On this lovely southern African sojourn the first order of business was to conduct research about contemporary dance and theater artists in this part of the world. For me personally it is all about my belief that Americans need to know more about the world and one way to do that is to experience the work the worlds’ artists are creating. And to have a better sense of place. I have written previously about most of the following artists/places but to summarize:

• Cape Town

1.   Infecting the City: a strange but oddly appropriate festival for this lovely ‘city by the bay’—European artists invited to make pieces of consequence about the city and its history. Working with local artists of course but certainly, intended or not, offering an outsider’s look at place and people. All work was site-specific.
2. Ingewaba lendoda lise cankwe ndlela (the grave of the man is next to the road), a production of Magnet Theater, traditional story-telling in isiXhosa language combined with physical theatre, music, dance, and video footage of the N2, along which young South Africans travel back and forth between their work in Cape Town and their homes and families in the Eastern Cape. Directed by Mandla Mbothwe.

• Windhoek, Namibia

Haymich Oliver, Windhoek, Namibia

1. First Rain Dance Theater, Haymich Oliver, Director. Interesting find in what seemed like the barren dance-land of Namibia. A group of active contemporary dancers with substantial training in both South Africa and Europe. They have danced together for some time, now have formed a company to take their work a professional and creative next step.

• Johannesburg/Dance Umbrella. I will describe/list here only the work that I think  Africa Consortium members might want to know more about.

1. Vincent Mantsoe’s SAN (which GDF presents fall ’10) was a great pleasure for me. I love Vincent’s work and SAN is no exception. Of course, seeing GULA, the perfect solo of all time, again after so many years was really the icing on my festival cake. I do not know where all SAN is going in the states but for those of you who are fans of Vincent’s please come to Albuquerque to see the work if no other nearby opportunity is available. If anyone reading this attended any of the MASA showcasing festivals in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire in the 90s, Vincent performed GULA for the first time at one of them and it was the talk of the event. This beautiful man becomes an equally beautiful BIRD. He does. It happens before your eyes without benefit of accoutrement. It is an exquisite perfectly choreographed gem of the kind of precise and compelling movement that will become Vincent’s dance signature.
2. Nelisiwe Xaba’s BLACK!…WHITE is an exceptional work but I am most excited about the possibility of bringing the two solos about the Hottentot Venus to Albuquerque. The Hottentot Venus, a young South African woman raised mostly in Cape Town, exotically pretty with larger-than-average buttocks, was exhibited throughout much of Europe as part of a Nineteenth century obsession with “freak” shows. She became the generally unwilling symbol of a colonial mindset that equated difference, i.e. non-white/non-European, with inferiority and the right to subjugate. 
3. PJ Sabbagha with Deep Night was one of two big festival surprises for me. A work about violence against women with powerful dancers, original choreography and even a message! (I like messages). This work is pure dance, less theatrical than much of the work here.  
4. THE TIME OF SMALL BERRIES is still for me the most important piece I’ve seen in awhile. I have already described it at length, so unless I have some comments from Sello Pesa and/or Peter Van Heerden I won’t say more. I did talk to a couple of other people here who agree that it is indeed a very weighty work full of cultural references that are way over our American heads but which, with a little research, are readily available. The Struggle is so recent (and goes on) and the wounds still raw so work like this has political and social resonance that ‘you had to be there’ to grasp. I am reminded a little of the Laramie Project although this is much more layered and purposefully messy.
5. Meeting with Malcolm Purkey/Artistic Director/Market Theater. I know many people in the U.S. know Malcolm but I did not and it was a thrill for me to meet someone so connected with theater in South Africa and especially the Market Theater. I explained to him that several members of Africa Consortium were interested in incorporating more theater into our programs but that many of us have fairly modest budgets and are generally interested in smaller and, in some cases, work at the more experimental end of the spectrum. Malcolm will be more than happy to work with Consortium members if we are interested in some of the original work produced by the Market.  
6. Boyzie Cekwana’s Influx Controls: wanna be wanna be is nothing if not unique! It is a solo so Boyzie’s imposing presence is everything. It is all about the world’s dark political forces and the masks we’re made to wear for survival so for a first passage of performance time, Boyzie carefully paints on a glossy black and red persona, which will appear quite evil or ironic or megalomaniacal or sorrowful or coquettish, depending on the moment. And then talks and moves his way through a condemnation of what’s wrong with the world all the while in his vest of explosives, eventually changing his black satin pants for a white tutu. A chorus in the back of the audience sings a moving and beautiful South African hymn/gospel along the way but much of the sound is simply Boyzie’s soft husky voice reiterating the woes that befall us because of our political leaders. At the end, with the artist, a quite large and lovely guy in red sneakers, white tutu, white satin bomb vest with red explosives, sunglasses and a crown of thorns, possibly sitting in your lap, you know you’ve just been part of a pretty remarkable piece. You will probably only have sporadically understood where the artist is going but then that’s the charm of the dance adventure isn’t it?

Wednesday night, I abandoned dance and bought a ticket to Foreplay at the Market Theater by a controversial young playwright labeled the ‘Township Tarantino,’ Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom. Foreplay consists of a diverse range of explicit sex acts—initiated or forced by the preacher, the playwright, the politician and the pleading boy. The women who submit unwillingly, semi-willingly and commercially are flawed but actually come across as stronger and smarter than the men. Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s the user, who’s the used. It is in your face front-row sex; one reviewer says “Foreplay is an essay on sex in Pretoria townships.” Figures…Pretoria is the primary seat of government. And HIV/AIDS is ever present but since its presence is represented by bubble gum bubbles and pink balloons I did not get that until reading the review.  I must admit to being bothered by the giggles of the students (in their preppy uniforms of pleated skirts, dress slacks, white blouses and shirts, dark jackets and ties) in attendance and for that matter much of the rest of the audience. The more sexually graphic and violent the scene the louder the laughter it seemed.  Okay okay okay…I am a little old lady in tennis shoes! All in all…the acting was powerful and the dance interludes intermingled with all that sex could be said to link Foreplay to Dance Umbrella!

 Politics and Ranting

I so love this country. A history like ours but not so buried or air-brushed into meaninglessness. South Africans aren’t pretending they’ve won the battles against racism, sexism, bad politicians yet. The battles still rage throughout the media and throughout the arts. I personally think America hasn’t won the battle either but we do tend to gloss everything over by—Shopping! Being politically crazy cautious!  Shopping some more! Voting for a man of African heritage and then not going back to the polls to elect people that are going to support his plans!  Shopping some more! Both countries—big spaces, pioneers, battles aplenty. Subjugation of the native peoples. Slavery/reconstruction/apartheid. And good energy and beautifully diverse smart people and great artists. Only the Struggle is fresh in the minds of the population here and the artists and thinkers are making certain it is explored thoroughly before being relegated to the history books largely ignored everywhere.

Jump to the present. Can’t confuse President Zuma (with his 3-4 wives and at least 20 children) with President Obama. Can equate the Tea Party types and their ‘traditional values’ with Zuma’s traditional values however which he uses to justify his large family. When people are baffled by life’s intricacies and feel like they’ve lost control, they turn to a past airbrushed with simplicity—called a time of traditional values. Where men were men and everybody knew their place. So, my female friends and relatives and acquaintances… we know, we’ve always known, that “traditional values” is ALWAYS ALWAYS a code phrase that means ‘women beware…you are about to be put back in your place—and that place, if you remember,  was NOT a desirable place to be.’ We have our problems in the U.S. with the traditionalists just as South Africans do with Zuma. I wish us all well.

The delectable delicious mopane worm

I eat the worm!

The Afrikaner thunders his god-like proclamations as ancient cultures slip away in a feast gone awry. Meanwhile Sowetans hang at their new Mall of America prototype…doing exactly what Minnesotans are doing half way round the world—spending money on designer labels, new cell phones, junk jewelry, DVD’s, washers and dryers. It has been an eye-opening couple of days here in Jo’burg where the rain has departed, the sun shines and we more and more absorb the big vitality and excitement of this country—so like the US in so many ways.

A second week of contemporary dance of every size and shape begins today. I vow to eat less, a difficult task since the food is delectably good here (although I can’t speak for the crispy, greasy, salty quotient of the endless array of fried chicken places) and the wine does seem to be way above average—even the house wines are always smooth with a kind of sunny freshness that  my seriously untutored palate actually notices. The African Crafts Market is appropriately stuffed with souvenirs from around Africa. Mostly beaded, carved, wired, tall, short, brown, gold, stripped, spotted giraffes, elephants, lions, zebras and hippo/rhinos abound; they’re called The Big 5 and they are the stuff of tourist nirvana—on hoof, paw or shop shelf. I would name South Africa’s Big 5 a little differently. Let’s see—how about the DANCE; the wide-open debate among everyday people and politicos about the future and SA’s continental role; the endless spaces of desert, veld, bush and farm country; the energy and excitement of the approaching world cup and finally the palpable presence of history-making in the very air you breathe.

About history then. An astonishing piece of work happened Sunday afternoon at the Dance Factory. Called The Time of Small Berries, created and performed by Sello Pesa, Peter Van Heerden and Andre Laubscher. I am doing my own interpretation, my own description here with some trepidation. I had to let the piece work through my psyche overnight before I even knew quite what it was—but a few minutes in I knew it was going to be important to me. Quite simply the work is what happened to the traditions of the indigenous people under colonialism. The Time of Small Berries was a special feast time in traditional African cultures—until Afrikaner colonialism obliterated it along with many of the other traditions of the Xhosa and Zulu people. The Afrikaners, founders of apartheid, in fact destroyed everything in their path that threatened their desire for total domination, replacing it all with a harsh and bitter Eurocentrism of the most regressive sort. The Time of Small Berries forces us to recognize that loss.

The audience wanders to the stage loading door, nearby Sello washes in preparation for the celebration, a pig slowly turns on the spit, drops of grease sizzle and the smell reminds me of a New Mexico political gathering in the South Valley on a crisp fall afternoon. When we finally enter the theater it is to sit in chairs circling the centerpiece…how incongruous a centerpiece it is with the chickens and dripping greasy messy meat and cases of beer just nearby…it is a white tablecloth and silver-set long table where visual artist/social activist Andre Laubscher, invites various audience members to sit. And talk. Meanwhile Sello Pesa and Peter Van Heerden pace, struggle, tie themselves literally in knots amidst sacks of spilling corn and beer. The chickens run under the chairs cackling in annoyance, stacks of plates are smashed violently by the actors over their own heads, a little more hesitantly by the audience, beer is everywhere, I guess what is South African/Afrikaner country music plays. Sello pees in a pail (discreetly) and donning his soccer uniform pontificates in an I-am-an-Afrikaner speech endlessly replicated—the irony building as platitudes from the whitest of cultures emanates from the throat of a powerful black African man. And still polite society sits around the table of colonialism discussing how to be happy, discussing what you do if your baby’s raped, somehow making it equally fit into the most inane of dinner table conversation. .

Peter Van Heerden and Sello Pesa are both respected dance/theater artists coming from very different places it seems. Peter is grappling with/exploring, through highly confrontive site-based and staged work, his identity as an Afrikaner white man in a society that has moved on from a time when that identity represented the source of all power. To see this work with roles reversed, Sello mouthing the Afrikaner speech, Peter literally tied, bound, struggling with his burdens of corn and history, so angry. This is an important piece, I think…I know. And a big messy theater piece. Not so many artists willing to delve quite this far into these relationships probably. I hope to ask both Sello and Peter via e-mail a little more about this work and include their comments in here.

There, I have dissected this work through my own naïve dance/South African history lens—it’s my story and I’m sticking to it in other words—only to be terribly embarrassed later if I find I completely misinterpreted everything.

History is contemporary is everywhere is alive here. Gregory Maqoma, our Dance Umbrella host and one of our favorite dance artists in this rich South African dance landscape, took some of us visitors on a drive through his hometown, Soweto. I’ve been before, the tourist route to the Apartheid Museum and the Hector Pieterson Museum (the 13-year-old child who was shot and killed as students marched to protest the forced teaching of Afrikaans in the schools—the resulting photo of the boy carried bleeding from the site by two other fleeing children was a huge chink in the armor of apartheid), we drove into the Beverly Hills of Soweto where the modest little home first shared by the young newly-married Mandelas and the only street in the world that has been home to TWO Noble Prize winners (Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu)  and we saw from the hill Winnie’s current rather grander house where she lives and maintains a still powerful role in the ANC.

The best part was simply driving around contemporary Soweto. While the area does have its Beverly Hills, it is more about the ordinary pleasant homes in the older communities—the kind of homes in which most of us live or grew up. The very word Soweto conjures up massive blocks and warrens of hovels and crime and hopelessness and while those areas do still exist, most lives are lived in modest little or not-so-little homes, agreeably furnished, well-maintained, filled with family and cooking and dogs.

Gregory took us to meet his mom, a lovely vital woman, a widow with three sons, the dancer, the soon-to-be sangoma (traditional healer) and the soccer player. Her home is spacious and comfortable and, if the treat she sent with us is an example, she is a cake baker extraordinaire. Gregory’s brother was home, the dogs were playing, the mom and sons equally proud of each other. It is such a rare treat to get to meet the artists’ families—we are most grateful to Greg for the opportunity. We also found out that Greg has been commissioned to choreograph the opening dance number for the World Cup games held in the massive Soweto stadium. Now I have a reason to watch the Cup!

Kids coming home from school, scuffing their sneakers, teasing each other, kids rehearsing in a community center, sun shines on the giant Orlando Towers, a disused power station whose two cooling towers are landmarks on the Soweto skyline. They now serve as a showcase for the electric blues, greens, reds and golds of everyday life in Soweto as a train winds past the musicians playing, the fruit waiting to be tasted in the biggest mural in Africa—they could be said to power a certain irrepressible Soweto energy and pride. I am not trying to convey that all is love and roses in Soweto but there is something very infectious about the pride everyone from there seems to find in those origins. After all Soweto and the townships of Cape Town are where it all happened. They forced a nation to freedom—pretty inspiring. Remember we fought a civil war in addition to our marches and freedom rides, and South Africans managed to do it without resorting to the battlefields in the way much of the world expected. Sorry about that…but I am simply over and over impressed with this place and these people—black and white South Africans.

My rain-starved being is feeling less famished. Another week before I head back to my desert—will I be saturated with early morning lush peace and writing quiet—and thunder and morning’s green damp and the Market Theater plaza’s wet night neon shining?

Festival Mode. At noontime everyday there’s dance talk at the Market, led by Adrienne Sichel, a dance writer and critic here for many years; she may in fact know more about dance in South Africa and on this continent than anyone else.  Adrienne is a striking older woman, rangy, blonde, pony-tail and jeans or sometimes suited and elegant, self-effacing you think until you realize how confidently she is addressing absolutely any dance subject related to Africa. The artists do want to talk—about how and why they make dance instead of doing what their mums and dads thought they should do, about politics of dance and the politics of ignoring politics in dance, about relationships within dance companies and between schools and locations and states and countries, and between the artists and the traditionalists of the Zuma government.

Attending a dance festival is an art in itself. The pace is maybe a bit slow in the beginning, haven’t started running into old friends, meeting new ones yet. Feeling out the best places for a wine or coffee, studying the programs to make sure you get to all of the performances and talks you don’t want to miss. Expectations are high! You know and love some of the artists, sometimes in spite of a particular piece, but mostly because you know who they are and what they mean to do with their dance. You expect all of the new work you will see to be brilliant. You expect to gain insight, broaden horizons, find new artists for your programs and you expect an agreeable surprise here and there.

The reality is almost as good as the expectations. Indeed all of the above happens! Artists show new sides of their creativity as they explore new ideas…black and white for example…what is that about in 2010? They make a new thing out of placing their own unique movement on a physically-opposite dancer. Or an artist you didn’t know gives you a new perspective on HIV/AIDS. How is that possible? And sometimes artists offer work that’s not quite ready or not well-conceived or executed or… you’re cold and tired and annoyed because the performance started so late…so the artist doesn’t get his/her creative due. In spite of never intending to slight any artist’s creative endeavors in any way, it does happen.

And over a beer and veggie lunch you talk to someone who surely ranks among the most idiosyncratic and perceptive artists you’ve met. A pattern develops. There’s another intellectually-stimulating or amusing or lazy lunch…and another. Afternoons might be for hanging out around the Market Theater and schmoozing with old friends and new. The Market has enough leather couches and chewy crusty chocolate-oozing soul-satisfying Brownies to sustain a visitor for a very long time. It’s all so damn civilized and thoughtful and…exciting.

About Neli

Nelisiwe Xaba is a pure treat for me, a South African woman, one of few recognized female choreographers from here, and a true free dance spirit it seems. She is indeed as smart and funny and creative as some of us have suspected from following her work for awhile. In the first piece of hers I ever saw she spent considerable time in one of those large blue and red-stripped plastic shopping bags so prevalent in Africa. But that was then and the level of sophistication has jumped ten-fold. The work performed in the Market Theater the last few nights, BLACK!…WHITE?, is all new and all elegant. Political at its base, quirky and visual in execution, an exploration of  just what it means to be black or white in a world where Neli believes this is a, if not the, main social/political question. Neli is also working with Malian and Brazilian choreographers on a piece with religion as its central thesis—certainly a work to which only someone with Neli’s irreverent worldview could do justice. But there is no funding for the piece and after all Mali, South Africa and Brazil are a bit far apart so maybe the work will never get made.

Most intriguing to me, Neli has made two dances about the Hottentot Venus, a pretty young South Africa woman taken to London to “display” her extraordinary physical feature, a rather substantial derriere, to European society. A book I am reading, The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman/Born 1789—Buried 2002, will surely clarify how many tales of Saartjie’s life are apocryphal, how many bona fide. The second of Neli’s two pieces is called something like “Sarkozy rejects the Venus” and is the story of IF Saartjie had come to France!  I cannot imagine how these pieces could not be original and a pure pleasure given the peculiarity and history of the story and Neli’s wit and political sensibilities. This is a project that, with some luck and careful planning, we may be able to get to Albuquerque!

About Vincent

Vincent Sekwati Koko Mantsoe can truly be given the label charismatic, a reality of which I was reminded last night at Dance Umbrella’s GALA opening. Vincent’s new work, SAN—destined for Albuquerque in October—was described in a previous post and I’ll come back to it in a minute. For now however I must talk just a little about the older solo, GULA. Made in 1992, it is a favorite of mine for all time. Vincent becomes a bird…as simple as that. I’ll use the description from the program to bring you further into why I like this work so much. “Gula Matari (The Birds) choreographed by the fabulous dancer Vincent Mantsoe, makes the dancer into a bird-being. One can only be fascinated by the simplicity and the accuracy of the disjointed and staccato gestures and is one of the most beautiful solos of the global contemporary repertoire.” Ayoko Mensah, Africultures, 1999”

I have a further relationship with GULA which attaches me even more deeply to the piece. In the 90s a richly-programmed and well-orchestrated artistic showcase/ conference/ festival of the African performing arts was held biennially over at least six years in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. MASA (Marché des Arts du Spectacle Africain) was my introduction to the broad range of contemporary performing arts on this continent and I was enchanted with it all. The bustling city of Abidjan, West African culture, new programs, colleagues, artists. It was a multi-layered sensual experience of tropical heat, skinny roasting chickens and fat roasting fish, the baguettes and verbosity of French colonialism and everywhere the background of West African music and vendors and traffic. In the midst of this, in the grand and rather ugly conference/arts center built for the people of the Ivory Coast by the Chinese, I saw GULA. What to say? Thank you Vincent. GULA is an exquisite gem of performance to be lodged carefully on a protected shelf but taken down as often as possible for the sheer pleasure of communing with this delicate bird being.

Just a little more about SAN—a journey begun by Vincent in a book of photographs of the rock carvings left by the Khoi-San people as they left their southern African homelands and sought new shelter. Called ‘the living people of the desert,’ connected to the origins of the human race, the Khoi-San are honored and accompanied by Vincent Mantsoe and his dancers on this leg of their trip.  Persian poetry and song offer a background somehow integral to the dance.

Vincent’s movement is so distinct that it seemed impossible that it could emanate from body types other than Vincent’s own.  His tightly constructed and sinewy body seems to be the uniquely correct container for the control, the possession so necessary to express the power of his work. So, seeing that movement placed on a rangy red-headed French guy and three women required some double-take moments for me initially—and then I LOVED IT. Aude Arago and Desiree Davids were completely mesmerizing, such different bodies channeling Vincent’s moves…extraordinary!

A Little about PJ

The surprise of Wednesday was a piece by PJ Sabbagha called DEEP NIGHT. There’s a message, all about HIV/AIDS and how deeply the “tiny, sophisticated virus permeates our minds, bodies and hearts…”, great dark video backdrop and remarkably strong and charismatic dancers in a hard-pounding, in-your-face piece. I’m looking forward to seeing the piece in its entirety on a DVD or in real life in the near future.

Goodnight

There was an elegant GALA reception last night where Jo’burg’s art elite mingled with champagne and tiny egg rolls in hand, sheltered from the rain, looking slick and sophisticated, schmoozing animatedly, taking on their ‘important reception’ personas. Less and less my cup of tea as I happily age out of the expectation that I might possibly ever be charming.

Dancing. Last night at the Market Theatre Nelisiwe Xaba turned black to white and back again in a piece that poked fun at our racial confusions through a kind of sophisticated slapstick that was all black and white bodies, fashion, accoutrements, film. Neli is a funny, sharp-dance-tongued, opinionated woman who happens to move like a magic creature. I am at the Dance Umbrella Festival, Johannesburg, South Africa. The piece: BLACK!…WHITE?

The night before, Vincent Sekwati Koko Mantsoe, invited us along on …”journeys and spirits of the Khoi-san people…” the inspiration for SAN. Considering the history-telling petroglyphs of the Khoi-san, the dancers search for a place that’s theirs even as the world keeps shifting markers. They battle interior and exterior forces with Vincent’s forceful, almost-aggressive, possessed-by-spirits-and-demons movements.

How’s that for the first two days of a festival? Plus vital discussion and getting to hang out in the best of all places/worlds/centers of art that matter—the Market Theater. More about the Market later. I think I could live there, in what I think are substantial rock and marble and granite constructions, arches, high ceilings, big fat leather couches everywhere, exotically-decked out and coffee bar restaurants.

My Perfect Life. IT GETS BETTER. In addition to this continuing dance feast, there is rain, pour-downs of pure water with no air between it seems. They mostly come at night and the guesthouse roof magnifies every beautiful noisy bucketful. Remember I’m from New Mexico…this is a water-heaven for my thirsty soul. The guesthouse, Tama Rumah, is the best! Rambling in oddly-shaped rooms with a bathtub here, a shower there, might be a double or single bed. Might be a grand mahogany-looking headboard-or none at all. Windows that open all about looking into one of many gardens and courtyards, coffeepots, cookies…it is just so so so damn…cozy.

I get up early, no alarm and write and write to the music of mourning doves and their chirpier cousins. Make a coffee, turn on the computer…don’t have to go anywhere until noon. It is indeed my idea of the perfect world. If I could just have the Bosque and my Rio Grande a few blocks away I would never leave.

Dance Umbrella/Jo’burg. Johannesburg, South Africa hosts the best dance festival on the continent in my humble opinion; one of the nicest anywhere. Almost all are SA artists, most from or connected to Jo’burg. It is impressive. Not so many cities could present a festival of this variety and strength, all with local artists—NYC, Paris/a few other Euro cities, Tokyo, Rio? maybe that’s it. Since I’m not a dancer/dance expert my colleague, who is here at the festival also, will surely be the one to give you the dancier details on her blog. I will pass that address on later. For me, for now I will just tell what I love and what moves me, and what I hear these captivating dance makers telling me. Maybe my role is to tell the layman’s dance stories.

In addition to two weeks of dance evenings, there’s a most helpful bonus in the series of 1pm interview-discussions that take place between Adrienne Sichel, Johannesburg’s long-time dance critic and scholar, and festival artists. Yesterday’s, with Adrienne interviewing Vincent and Neli was particularly eye-opening for me. I’ve seen both artists’ work several times and I’m always struck by Vincent’s very distinct movement style. When I described him as appearing to dance-fight his way out of a spiritual or demonic possession of some frightful intensity that is simply what I see, the personal story I am making of the art he is presenting to me. Vincent talked yesterday about his attempts to make work that is about the spirit, the search, the individual, not to let it be muddled with contemporary social and political reality all of the time.

Neli appears to be quite the opposite. Her work is all inventive, idiosyncratic , and full of humor and wry comment. Her perspective is ALL about society and politics. She works much of the time in Europe and also in Brazil. BLACK!…WHIITE? is about race…what Neli claims as an overwhelming issue world-wide, not just here in SA.

Both artists include white dancers/artists in their work and both have been criticized for it. Neli, with a slightly caustic laugh, says ‘it seems it’s okay for white choreographers to have black dancers but the reverse bothers people…maybe blacks still aren’t supposed to be telling whites what to do…!” The artists spar a bit over their differing approaches. Everyone agrees on one thing however. Without a renewed effort to gain support for contemporary work here at home…it will increasingly become making their work with and even for Europeans all of the time—that’s where the funding exists.

Jo’burg. We’ll get around this rich vital energetic city more in the next days…but I’ve been here before and I still don’t quite get it! Cape Town was so easy. A beautiful multi-racial city by the bay. Johannesburg. Is. Not. Africa “Lite.” Our neighborhood, Melville, could be any up-scale, yuppie, hip neighborhood in any city world over. And—there may not be anything else quite like it in this city of 2+ million. We drove through downtown/city center last night: Impressive, even grand in some cases, buildings. Wide streets. Parks. Corporate headquarters, City Hall. It was end of the work day so street activity was thinning…could have been Houston. What was noticeable to me—because I keep looking for signs of post-racial South Africa (or post-racial anywhere else for that matter) was there was not a single white person along the entire drive.  Gerard, one of our friendly Dance Umbrella hosts says, in response to my comment about this, that not so many years ago you ONLY saw whites on downtown streets unless it was time for the cleaners and servants to go home for the day.

This weekend we’ll go with our dance friends to Soweto. Now I think Lawrence, our festival driver, said a city of 4+ million. Biggest black city in the world he says.

Meanwhile I guess Zuma’s in London being feted by the Queen so maybe that attention will compete with his impulse to only appeal to the traditionalist, least progressive SA voices, and somewhere among his minions they will realize the art is good and not necessarily only important at ceremonial dances for a new wife.