Is an African man less African, or less cultural, if he wears a suit? Or a pink shirt? Or a dress?
These are the type of questions dancer-choreographer Gregory Maqoma actively poses to audiences and his peers. The recipient of the 2002 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for dance defies stereotyping. Personal, social, artistic and historic perspectives constantly inform his dancing and his dancemaking.
What you see, in person and in performance, is what you get - a sophisticated, articulate, urban mix springing from the cultural cocktail of his Soweto childhood. This son of Orlando East was steeped in listening to jazz, idolising Michael Jackson on TV and absorbing isicathimaya, gumboots and all forms of African traditional dance.
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All these influences have been subsequently layered with his training at Moving Into Dance and at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, culminating in the formation of his company, the Vuyani Dance Theatre Project.
This is no dumb dancer Maqoma, no stranger to winning awards, relishes the national recognition the Young Artist accolade will bring, as well as being "a bit of a breather from having to find funds to do new work".
This is no dumb dancer. His paper Cultural Identity, Diversity and Modernity in Education - History as a Springboard, delivered at the University of Cape Town School of Dance's Confluences 3 conference in July, is a contemporary African artist's personal and artistic manifesto.
"I can only remain true to who I am with my cellphone in my hand, a computer at my desk," Maqoma writes. "I take my role as an artist seriously even though I am carrying the burden of trying to find a balance between my own identity and the confrontations I face in everyday life as a South African."
Although the product of a middle-class family, who chose not to practise traditional rituals, when he was 18 Maqoma's curiosity led him to be ritually circumcised in the Eastern Cape.
"The initiation was proof to me that you can do these things because they exist, but if you are not brought up in that way, it means nothing."
The context is black man as museum piece This highly individual artist, who dropped out of dance for two years to work as an insurance underwriter and lost out on a medical scholarship, is aware of all his contradictions.
"If we have to blame anyone," he jokes, "it must be my grandmother, Cecilia Maqoma, in Port Alfred. She loves ballroom dancing. But she also performed the Xhosa initiation ritual with me."
Southern Comfort, commissioned for Celebrate South Africa's New South Africans in Full Flight London season in May and which premiered as a full work at The Dance Factory in September, is quintessential Maqoma. Art quirkily intersects with politics. Aesthetics spiral out of physical, verbal, visual and musical collusions.
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