how to be a stripper who knows what she is doing

The title refers to a comment by a theatre critic of my product Qaphela Caesar! at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. While calling it a "magnificent reflection of power" she wrote:

you feel assaulted by dance that is literary and obscure … hampered by an excess of metaphors, references and symbols, then many, it gets caught in its own multiply-layered skirts (Sassen 2012)[1].

This paper explores what "literary" dance might look similar bringing attending to forms of choreography and theatre making that are alike to ways of writing an article, a book or a research paper. The critic's comment points to the hazards of dumbo, research-heavy theatrical productions and serves every bit a good prompt to investigate why and how such productions have emerged, and what their place in the field of research might be.

Theatre and dance criticism in this land is rare, and in many respects these art forms are uninterrogated beyond a simple judgement of whether an audience may or may not similar a product. It is non my intention to claiming much of that. Sassen'due south comment, though, serves equally an ironic starting point to get to the bottom of my admittedly dense, multi-layered and in many instances obscure piece of work, and to probe its referencing, its forms and its subjects. My intention is besides to unpick the work in the quest for something that contributes to the field of literary dance in a substantial way—be it at the intersection of media, the various sites of the works, the perpetual interplay between tradition and modernity, or the collaborative processes of inquiry and creation. The interplay between the works' forms and content, derived in the primary from contemporary South African society, is an exercise in disruption, fragmentation, impressionistic collage and unresolved conclusions. I subtitled Qaphela Caesar!, which Sassen critiques to a higher place, a multi-media massacre of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar for good reason.

I examine three productions (Trunk of Evidence, Qaphela Caesar! and rite) and consider this "hybrid" approach to research in theatre making—how a single performative moment tin exist imbued with multiple influences, references and points of entry and exit to grapple with a unmarried question: how does the production serve as a vehicle for meeting complication with complexity and sometimes opacity? The context and discipline of these mixed media productions—memory and apartheid, truth and reconciliation, the spillages, slippages, overflows of emotion, the attempts at making meaning and the desire for reconstruction—lead me to consider class in our gild, its multiple manifestations, its colonial roots and its rhizome-like appearance. The preponderance of deconstructed and reassembled political formations in contemporary South Africa, starting with the nation's tenuous grasp on human rights and its politics (the improvised relationship betwixt the socialist origins of the ruling party and belatedly commercialism is an instance), forces me to think of a layered and circuitous matrix in considering both the kinetic and the nonetheless trunk every bit it navigates such assaults on its resilient however delicate frame. In art making, one impulse in the confront of such a conundrum may be to weed out, clean upward, reduce and essentialize. My dominant impulse is to overlay and overflow, equally well as riff into ironic self-consciousness, in a sometimes anarchic manner, only with an attempt to embody the disruption and rupture that is so visible in our club's fabric. And it is non always palatable, nor easy to digest.

In considering the iii productions, I focus on a ascendant choreographic research approach in each.

one. Embodiment and collaborative research in Trunk of Evidence
In the early 1990s, Dr Leonard Lehrer, a forensic scientist at the University of Cape Boondocks, approached me with some alarming findings equally a result of examining bodies that had met their end through violent means in the Eastern Cape Province. The nearly hitting finding was the fact that for every 1 death as a effect of political violence , there were vii deaths of women every bit a result of domestic violence, killed past someone they knew (a conclusion based on the prevalence of edgeless instruments, grabbed in rage — murders committed without a strategic motive).

Xv years after, as the prevalence of such violence grew, I wanted to focus on structural violence from a personal point of view. I probed the containment of violence in i'southward torso as a result of continued and pervasive economic, physical and psychological abnegation, despite  external  political transformation.

In the workshop procedure, with xi performers from the Siwela Sonke Trip the light fantastic toe Theatre, based in Durban and ranging in age from 22 to 72, I constitute processes of working that examined the torso as a filing cabinet of memory. Through a series of workshop performance rituals that developed a safe internet for mining personal experiences, I journeyed with the dancers into improvisations and compositions around hurting, affect, structural violence, abnegation and the body's kinetic and vocal responses.

The product foregrounded my involvement in collaborative choreography that had developed over many years. The atypical choreographic vocalization had proven to be reductive and simplistic, then I had looked for ways in which choreography could sally as a issue of a group process, where individual dancers had a strong paw in the development of the final piece of work. This way of working has its precedent in workshop theatre practices in South Africa. And so, while my references were the field of study of retention, structural and interpersonal violence; my field of inquiry was grounded in the dancers and the immediacy of daily experience. At the outset a code of ethics was established from intense discussions which covered individual volition and agency to step in and out of processes to the awarding of choreographic credit to all participants involved in the process. This collaborative choreographic model meant the research was embodied even before we started actually rehearsing the work.

Before we explored the key themes or content, the workshop sessions comprised more formal choreographic elements, such as the apply of interpersonal and personal space (kinesphere), subjective temporalities, the body and its architecture, and exercises in emotional and sense retentiveness and its form in terms of colour, texture, shape, rhythm. As a means of acting grooming I drew heavily on the principles of early twentieth century Russian manager, Konstantin Stanislavsky, to reach sense and emotional memories. In what has become known every bit the Stanislavsky Method, this recall precipitated a mimetic approach to acting, reproducing these states equally "existent" deportment of a character for a genre of theatre known every bit "realism" or "naturalism". In training for Torso of Evidence, the dancers were taken through a serial of these think exercises extended through metaphoric utilise of "cellular retentiveness within the body", and and then led to give form to these through pieces of movement, visual drawings, and installations with the use of objects and sound. Stanislavsky'southward Method then generated impulses of call back as points of ignition that resulted in idiosyncratic and highly subjective trip the light fantastic linguistic communication that eschewed the mimetic and worked with surreal imagery. The event was a cacophony of phrases of movement, sometimes vocalized, containing opaque abstractions of the actual feeling or memory of that feeling.

Importantly, my original intention — to give an elegant, kinetic form to the chaos of intensely personal experiences of violence — was itself disrupted and upended. A completely surprising, direct and evocative dance linguistic communication began to emerge. Sometimes immobilized and static, sometimes repetitive and diffuse, it took the grade of mysterious and messy non-sequiturs rather than coherent, recognizable dance phrases.

On stage, these episodes occurred confronting and within projections of body parts that were sketched by Henry Vandyke Carter, who illustrated the anatomical guide for students by Henry Gray, in their iconic book Gray's Anatomy. The drawings are both detailed and naïve, prompting a sense of symmetry and order in the body, which the performances challenged and superseded. But the drawings still offered a forced coherent frame which the performances spilled out of.

I shall focus on the experience of one of the dancers, Nelisiwe Rushualang. Her written report of violence was prompted by the response of a centre-aged white woman whom Rushualang sabbatum next to on a park bench. In one of the workshops Rushualang who, like all of us, had experienced violence on a large calibration, homed in on her sense of annihilation in this run into with someone who did not do much more than subtly turn away, tauten her neck and avoid her eyes, making information technology impossible for Rushualang to just sit restfully on a park bench. This tautening of the neck was to become Rushualang's main metaphor and bespeak of departure. She moved quickly from this feel of disdain to embodying it. In doing so, she felt more in control of what was, for her, a devastating moment. Her physical realization of this state of disdain included using bandages to tie her cervix in a set position and, with bandages coming up to her head, holding at the heart a blonde wig propped upwardly by a long stick.

In the production, set against a large-scale project of a Grayness'southward Anatomy drawing of a cross section of the throat and neck, Rushualang is brought in by five dancers with onion sacks on their heads, each belongings i of the bandages connected to her cervix. Rushualang'southward entrance is discomforting withal purple. Much later on, in a scene played out against projections of internal views of the rib muzzle and thoracic cavity, she and her "husband", Siyanda Duma, perform a scene of paranoia and vigilance, the ribs now doubling as loftier gates, a protective cavity or a muzzle of cartilage and bone. The anxiety and holding of one's jiff while attempting to savour the privilege of the generous space of their living room, is exacerbated past composer James Webb's deconstructed sound of the movement of the rib cage during difficult animate. Fastened to Rushualang's bandaged mitt is a light that she uses to hunt out whatever potential violation of her security.

During the course of this duet betwixt Rushualang and Duma, another dancer, Ntombi Gasa, enters in a typical South African maid'south compatible, but too wearing a massive faux fur coat (property an obscure story of desire). She sprawls out on a long table, looking on in a kind of boredom at this constant replay of paranoia. As the scene builds, the other dancers abdomen-roll their way along the floor like guerrillas, slowly and unobtrusively, silhouetted against the bottom of the project of the rib cage, where the diaphragm might be. On their backs are little paper-thin houses. As they alluvion the phase, there are moments where in that location appears to be an entire housing settlement underneath and inside Rushualang's supposedly impenetrable womb of condom. As the operation becomes increasingly anarchic and chaotic, Rushualang in her regal dress falls to her knees hammering the floor as she navigates the anarchy, her bandages now pull at loaves of brown breadstuff trailing backside her. In the last moments, Duma cuts the bandages and releases Rushualang'due south cervix, leaving the loaves of bread behind every bit they make their way slowly out of the ensuing chaos to their rib cage home.

That this development in the work came from a single collaborative epitome—the stiffening neck of a woman observed, felt and replicated in numerous generative formations — speaks to this notion of embodied and collaborative enquiry.

Trunk of evidence, by Jay Pather and Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre, 2009. Photos by Val Adamson, courtesy of Jay Pather.

2. Architecture, form and site in Qaphela Caesar!
The initial impulse for creating the mixed-media, site-specific production Qaphela Caesar!, based on William Shakespeare'due south Julius Caesar, came at a fourth dimension of great political upheaval in South Africa. Qaphela in isiZulu translates as "Beware" and serves every bit both an exhortation to Caesar to exist conscientious and an injunction to exist careful of Caesar.

Under Nelson Mandela, South Africans were convinced of the intimate and directly relationship between governance and society, but with Mbeki and so Zuma, politics became disaffected and removed, with machinations stemming from the appetite and political desires of individuals, and the populace at a remove. Shakespeare'southward Julius Cae sar served as an evocative vehicle for these regimes, but more importantly it was a frame and a construction to look back and forrard in time. The use of Shakespeare'southward work was intended to annotate on the capitulation of the South African regime to Western political machination. An opening sequences plays a black and white pic of Julius Caesar ( featuring Charlton Heston), while the African continent watches, learns and imitates.

Qaphela Caesar by Jay Pather and Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre, 2012. Photo by Val Adamson, courtesy of Jay Pather.

There were several other points of intersection with Shakespeare's original and my sense of contemporary Southward Africa at the time—the rise notions of dictatorship; the tussle between the skillful fight of the past and the political expediency of the present; prophesy and tradition and their role in politics; xenophobia and mob violence; conspiracy and repetitive betrayals; incitement and the spillage and overflow of spiraling emotion.

I likewise wanted to reference the process whereby this default colonial education brought me to Shakespeare in the first place. For example, at Drama School I was compelled to attend a Language Laboratory to undo deviant sounds in order to speak Shakespearean iambic pentameter. So, amongst other disruptions, I staged an interjection with thespian Mwenya Kabwe. Nosotros handed out original scripts to the audition, imploring them to go usa back "on track" and and so insulted their lack of proper Queen'southward English in their reading.

The various locations of the productions provided a concrete structure to contain this level of layering and came to decide its form: the Cape Town Metropolis Hall, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the Pretoria State Theatre. I shall annotate largely on the Cape Boondocks product.

The Greatcoat Town City Hall is a large Edwardian edifice, built in 1905 from materials and fixtures (such every bit the massive organ) from England. The Urban center Hall also boasts the balustrade from which Nelson Mandela spoke for the first time directly later his release in 1990 to a massive, bewildered, adoring and jubilant crowd. His speech, starting with the words: "Comrades and boyfriend South Africans, I greet yous all in the proper noun of peace, commonwealth and freedom. I stand here before you not as a prophet, but as a apprehensive servant of you the people," has get an iconic marking of selfless leadership[ii].

As independent within this one edifice, these disparate historic events , the colonial circumstances leading to the cosmos of this building as well as Mandela's historic oral communication signalling the onset of commonwealth, provided compelling material for the melding and collapsing of fourth dimension and space continuums as well as political epochs, memory, history and futurity. Ultimately it was the presentation of the work in 14 rooms of varying dimensions, across two floors of the City Hall that provided its structure. Starting in the lobby and working back and forth through the various rooms helped realize my interests in memory and time, bringing the audience into a surreal dreamy space rather than retelling the narrative. The flow from space to space provided an episodic sensibility. The audition met near the historic balcony and waited in the ornate hallway of Edwardian pillars and balconies from which dancers watched surreptitiously.

From hither the audience was led through the fourteen rooms with each room given a item theme every bit the tragedy unfolded:

1. a room for a press conference
The large room leading from the entrance foyer was set with tables and chairs for a printing conference. Used as a press conference room for the 2010 Soccer Globe Cup, insignia and detritus nonetheless remained. This suggested that the entire production begins indeed with Caesar's assassination and a press conference convened direct afterwards. The audience entered to a character not in Shakespeare's play — a smartly suited man in a squealer's mask who sat and watched. He appears throughout the production. The briefing began with Marker Anthony's 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen' monologue, delivered by Mwenya Kabwe as if to a printing corps made up of the audience. This is slowly interrupted by the plaintive singing in isiZulu of Caesar's partner Calpurnia (played as a sangoma [diviner] past Nelisiwe Rushualang), as well as dancers and opera singers interspersed amongst the audience. The disruption rises to a cacophony as Calpurnia, uninterested in the political machinations of Anthony, leads the audience upstairs to the even larger banquet room of the Metropolis Hall.

ii. a large room for nostalgia, debris and deal making
Here, the work begins with the project of a sixteen mm blackness and white motion-picture show of Julius Caesar,[iii] and a plaintive cleaner wheeling in a dust bin, in some apocalyptic future. Caesar, played by Nkhanyiso Kunene, emerges from the bin and gets dressed in a once sharp, now dusty conform. This transition takes united states of america backwards in time. To the strains of Schubert'south Expiry and the Maiden and bracing, modernist choreography, great swathes of men and women perform with bailiwick and style at the Opening of Parliament and Inauguration. Information technology is also here that a quieter choreography of conspiracy begins.

3. a room for hot air
The audition is and so led into a modest blue room, alike to a smoking room full of politicians in suits with their pants around their ankles, shuffling effectually aimlessly. Hanging limply from their mouths are white balloons used as spoken communication bubbles that inflate and deflate in their earnestness to delight and say the politically expedient thing. Caesar, in the eye of it all, makes ridiculous gestures to an opera singer's rendition of "Brindisi" (The Drinking Vocal) from La Traviata.

iv. a room for courage and conscience
This is a quiet scene in one of the smaller, more intimate rooms, wood-panelled with wall-to-wall narrow cupboards. The audience enters to run across Brutus gazing at a tall chair with want and hunger. His wife Portia enters and their duet ensues with Portia's original text on conscience spoken by Mwenya Kabwe. This ends when eight conspirators led by Cassius emerge from the cupboards, cutting though the intimacy of the duet. After an athletic and aggressive group choreography, Brutus leaves with the conspirators. Some other singer, continuing on a closet, begins a Blues vocal, and Portia is joined by several women who also emerge from the cupboards.

5. a room of power, sex and prophesy
The Mayor's Parlour, a dark woods-panelled room with impressive ceiling-to-floor windows and doors, is in the centre of the Hall. There, the smart-suited man in the pig mask dances the tango with a fellow dancer as well in a grunter mask. Brutus and the conspirators enter and seduced by the sounds of the tango, brainstorm a choreography of excessive masculinity. This gives way to a stripper, who approaches a pole in the centre of the room and performs as the choreography accumulates and becomes raucous, overflowing with obscenities and an excessive display of masculinity.

6. a room for farewells, the women know
The audience is then ushered into a very small room, where the herb mphepho is burning, and is and so fatigued into a ritual begun by Rushualang as Calpurnia. Actor Mwenya Kabwe speaks the text of prophesy.

Qaphela Caesar by Jay Pather and Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre, 2012. Photos by Val Adamson, courtesy of Jay Pather.

7. a room of death
Caesar'due south assassination is comprised of a walk-through of a room in which 12 headless, blimp black suits in various positions of fleeing hang from the ceiling, blood quietly dripping from the sleeves onto the white floor. The soundscape of blithe flies envelops the room. Audition members step on bricks to make their way through. In one corner Caesar lies wrapped in a blood-soaked grey blanket. Calpurnia gently cradles his head to the soprano vocals by a immature vocaliser in a schoolhouse uniform continuing on the mantlepiece.

8. a room of aftermath, expediency, no return
Underneath two large platforms Brutus experiences the outset affluent of power. Ii dancers higher up him on the platforms perform a agonizing duet. One wears a protective miner'due south mask, another, a white mask made of clay. One grates a piece of reddish soap while the other slowly tears open up taut plastic attached to his skin, unleashing knives and forks that clatter effectually his feet.

nine. a room of war
A section of fast and urgent group choreography erupts in a large room with several video projections of burn down. Portia performs a solo every bit she tries to recall hundreds of shoes left by fleeing and dying citizens.

ten. a room for ghosts
Brutus sits in a room that is saturated with hanging video tape as data bleeds and spreads. It is an unwinnable war. Caesar'due south ghost appears and a duet betwixt the two ensues to the plaintive singing of a sangoma (diviner) in isi Zulu.

xi. a room to escape
This is a small and elementary room overflowing with shredded paper that emerges from a shredding machine operated past a bored secretary. She chews gum while inserting document after document. There is, nevertheless, a window open and a pall blows. In between the audio of the shredder and the air current, we hear Brutus'due south last words on echo:

Caesar, now be even so.
I killed non thee with half and then adept a will.

12. a passage of regret
A long passage extends down the entire length of the City Hall. The audience is led down this passage post-obit a moving platform. At the back of the platform is a screen onto which is projected slow motion, black and white footage of S African protest marches between 1950 and 1990. A drag artist in full regalia stands in front of the screen and as the procession moves, in faux solemnity they lip sync to Barbara Streisand's rendition of Memories (Like the corners of my listen/ Misty water coloured memories/ Of the manner we were.)

13. a room for announcements — the new gild
The audience is led to a room with a podium. In the play, Octavius is inaugurated as the new Male monarch and hither he appears every bit another thespian dressed in drag, as the so leader of the opposition party, Helen Zille.

14. a room with a view — borrowed, blustering, blue
The audience is led into a big empty banquet hall with Mr and Mrs Grunter in the heart and a tabular array of spectacles filled with wine. The audience tin only see the action through a windows overlooking a large balcony. An Afrikaans youth band is lit up brightly exterior on the balustrade, singing nationalist rock songs, and they lead the audience into a heady celebration of the new order.

3. Interrupting structure, suspending narrative: rite
At the turn of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky provided a score for choreography by Nijinsky that caused something of a furore. Le Sacre du Printemps was a series of nine movements that culminated with the cede of a young woman to appease the gods of rain and usher in jump. The structure is formal in its development of narrative and divided into two main sections.

Part I, titled Adoration of the Globe, comprised the following movements: An Introduction; Augurs of Bound; Ritual of Abduction; Spring Rounds; Ritual of the Rival Tribes; Procession of the Sage and Trip the light fantastic toe of the World.

Function Ii, The Sacrifice, also begins with a adequately long Introduction and goes on to Mystic Circles of the Young Girls; Glorification of the Chosen One; Evocation of the Ancestors; Ritual Activeness of the Ancestors and the Sacrificial Trip the light fantastic.

It was instructive that the description of the final two sections was as follows: (Evocation of the Ancestors) The Chosen One is entrusted to the intendance of the old wise men, and, (Ritual Action of the Ancestors and the Sacrificial Dance) The Chosen One dances to expiry in the presence of the onetime men.

Over the years, the number of productions of Stravinsky's score that have critiqued and commented on this sexist interpretation hands outnumber straightforward restagings of the original work. Setting the work in gimmicky S Africa, which has some of the highest incidences of gender-based violence in the world, was non as obvious a decision as it may have appeared. Performed at Maboneng, in downtown Johannesburg, rite dealt with the tension between cultural attitudes towards femme-identifying persons and a contemporary grappling with this in a order where the development of African tradition and indigeneity accept been severely disrupted and disrespected. I used Stravinsky's taut structure to create a conversation between tradition and the contemporary. I did this by interrupting the flow of the music later on each department (which featured traditional, modernist choreography, in some instances comprising classical Zulu and Tswana dances) with a section of contemporary performance, often including video project, text, and chat with the audience. This mechanism helped both drive the narrative to its compelling if horrific end, and create moments of inertia, suspension and bathos that put into question the pressing drive of singular traditions. I choose 3 instances in the work to illustrate this.

In Function II, after what Stravinsky calls "the Mystic Circles of the Immature Girls", dancer, Ntombi Gasa, sits in forepart of the dancers who have just performed the "Mystic Circles" and speaks directly to the audition almost virginity testing in her community. In the course of Gasa's telling of a personal story, the other dancers go agitated and question the wisdom of sharing the intimate secrets of a airtight community. (The defection against telling cultural secrets, led largely past the male dancers, is something that actually happened in a rehearsal.) Nosotros decided equally a company to stage the revolt by retaining aspects of statement that emerged in the rehearsal and allowing the dancers to improvise around this. This allowed persuasive, dissenting views to emerge. At i point, a young female dancer stops everyone and pointing to the audience (at the Dance Umbrella Festival) challenges Gasa: "These people have taken everything from usa why exercise y'all want to sell them secrets of our culture as well?"

After another department, "Ritual of the Rival Tribes", ii dancers engage in traditional stick fighting in an athletic fight sequence that results in one of the dancers (Sibusiso Gantsa) "killing" the other (Mxolisi Nkomonde). As Stravinsky's score ends and the trunk is lifted by Nkomonde'southward "female parent", the terminal strains of this movement see Gantsa ostracised by the community. The contemporary sequence that follows meditates on black masculinities. The production, a critique of the original Le Sacre du Printemps, with its ritualized killing of a young maiden while a group of elderly men watch, however had to confront the emasculation of black men in particular—a subject that became a potent point of contention during discussions and workshops with the cast. This moment, after a traditional fight sequence that valourises masculine violence, was a moment to begin probing the paradoxes and complexities of contemporary masculinities via a unmarried character.

Gantsa'due south solo is full of interruptions and failures. In an paradigm synthetic past Gantsa himself, he wears his trousers upside down. With the pelvic region at his feet, keeping his legs from moving freely, a second dancer hangs cabbage leaves, portending hunger and lack, effectually him, creating a bizarre universe. A few male dancers in blond wigs and blood-red stilettos — a faux impersonation of the "white madam" — play with the audition, farther disrupting the focus on Gantsa. Finally, a group of black women in Afro wigs move in, balancing the coveted cabbages on their heads. The four men in their blond wigs have the cabbages from these women and brainstorm pelting Gantsa with them, showtime playfully and then more violently, while the four women sing and dance to Beyoncé's Put a ring on it. The "blondes" and so snatch the Afro wigs from the women'south heads, causing them to terminate singing, hand them the bruised cabbages and flounce off. Gantsa continues to dance in spite of all of this. The iv women slowly bring the cabbages to their mouths and start eating them furiously, using their teeth equally graters or precipitous knives and slowly approach Gantsa. The audio becomes impossibly loud, Gantsa turns faster and faster, and with the four women's teeth gnashing away at pieces of flying cabbage, the lights fade.

rite begins with a tense late-night give-and-take (using text and trip the light fantastic toe simultaneously) between a human being (Mxolisi Nkomonde) and a adult female (Chuma Sopotela) about a film they have but seen. This escalates into an argument and Nkomonde launches into a verbal attack that catapults him into psychic darkness. Sopotela flees as Stravinsky'south music begins, opening with a plaintive flute taking us back to an old fourth dimension (and notwithstanding something that impinges on the now). By, present and future blend and fall over one another. And so both the traditional and contemporary tragedy begins.

Rite by Jay Pather and Siwela Sonke Trip the light fantastic toe Theatre, 2015. Photos past Val Adamson, courtesy of Jay Pather

In the end, as Stravinsky's music drives towards the sacrificial trip the light fantastic of the maiden, the two time-frames—the traditional and the contemporary—intersect in one case more. Afterward the climactic sacrifice where the maiden falls to her expiry, the rain does come—in the form of an obviously rendered recording of a Highveld thunderstorm. The dancers remove their traditional cloth, put on plastic raincoats and hold open white umbrellas onto which television static is projected. The large grouping make attempts at some kind of communication and exit to reveal a contemporary Sopotela again. Nkomonde finds her and implores: "Where take y'all been? I've been going crazy searching for yous. I made 1 stupid, unthinking mistake and you disappear. Say something? Don't simply stand in that location. Please say something." She waits, then turns sharply to face him and puts her hand on his rima oris shutting him upwards. In this silence, the concluding two minutes of Stravinsky's music is played again, all the style to the climactic finale. There is silence for a moment. Sopotela removes her hand. And unexpectedly, a bewildered not as yet "woke" Nkomonde, walks away.

Sopotela's agency in silencing Nkomonde and getting him to listen follows a range of investigations into a continuum of gender, violence and tradition in contemporary Due south Africa. And yet, in that location is no easy solution. Sopotela's gesture of agency, like gender-based violence in South Africa, remains untenable, suspended, unresolved. These experiments in form do not only have their legacy in rehearsals of global gimmicky deconstruction, but in a legacy connected to Due south Africa. Layers of image and movement, open up-ended forms, applesauce, the non-sequitur — all conspire to destabilize the conventional theatre construction and meet the complexities and nuances of trauma that has not been attended to, where audience, site and artist conspire to create a field of witness of the disruptive and the extreme. This is where the multiplicity of layered skirts comes in, and it is where my productions tend to stay these dense monsters that seem impossible to navigate.

I opened this article with a comment from a theatre critic, I stop with another. Besides writing well-nigh Qaphela Caesar! Mary Corigall wrote in the Sunday Independent:

In his work, Jay Pather adopts a hybrid language that not only tests the boundaries of concrete rhetoric merely is fatigued from a multiplicity of disciplines; pic, literature, theatre, and other forms of popular civilization are all grist to this choreographer's manufactory. In Qaphela Caesar!, synchronised choreography, film excerpts, videos and documentary footage are woven into a cord of vignettes that are populated by dancers, a existent-life stripper, an Afrikaans pop band, a sangoma and witch doc (sic)… it is the intrinsic excess in his piece of work that gives it its meaning. There are so many scenes, so many ideas, so many ironic gestures that the viewer merely cannot comprise — or even procedure — it all. He presents a reality that has been warped through the lens of theatrics to the point at which its underlying obscenities rise to the surface[4].

And I guess, every bit with all enquiry, ane hopes that someone sees the point of it all.

Jay Pather is director of the Institute for Artistic Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town where he is Professor. Here Pather has created structures for interdisciplinary collaboration in the form of Fellowships, a Post Graduate Programme in public and live art, public lecture programmes and interdisciplinary conferences. His research and artistic work deploys site-specific, interdisciplinary and intercultural strategies to frame postcolonial imaginaries and matters of social justice. He curates the Infecting the City Public Art Festival; the ICA Live Art Festival, the Afrovibes Festival (Amsterdam and UK) and currently an edition of Due south African functioning fine art for the Spielart Festival in Munich. Contempo art works include Qaphela Caesar (a deconstruction of Julius Caesar), at the old Johannesburg Stock Commutation in downtown Johannesburg and rite, a re-imagining of Stravinsky'southward Le Sacre du Printemps. Recent publications include manufactures in New Territories: Theatre, Drama, and Functioning in Mail service-apartheid South Africa edited my Marc Meaufort; Irresolute Metropolis ll edited by Marie Polli; Rogue Urbanism edited by Edgar Pieterse and Abdul Malik Simone; Performing Cities edited past Nicholas Whybrow and Theater Magazine (in press). He serves as a juror for the International Award for Public Fine art and on the Board of the National Arts Festival of Southward Africa. He was recently appointed Fellow at Academy of London and made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres past the French Ministry of Culture.

ramirezwetter.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.on-curating.org/issue-49-reader/caught-up-in-multiply-layered-skirts-or-whats-a-stripper-doing-in-julius-caesar.html