So what do South Africans dance about? That’s the same tantalising question pivotal to the annual Dance Umbrella contemporary dance festival.
For the past 24 years answers – some expected, others startling or downright provocative – have been provided by dancers and choreographers as they expressed their ideas, concerns or simply let their imaginations run riot.
This eclectic choreographic platform – now carefully curated and commissioned – offers a window not only into where we are at as a society, but who we are in all our cultural diversity,
Now in its second edition without a blanket sponsor (FNB pulled out in 2010) Dance Umbrella, thanks to the National Lottery, the National Arts Council, the Goethe Institut, Rand Merchant Bank and other partners, is gearing up for 2012 and its 25th anniversary next year.
Dance Forum, headed by Umbrella and New Dance artistic director Georgina Thomson, have persevered to keep this now internationally recognised festival going. Testimony to this showcase’s reputation is that 17 international producers and programmers will attend. Performances will be spread between Goodman Gallery Projects at Arts on Main, The Dance Factory, The Market Theatre, The Wits Theatre, the Old Stock Exchange in Diagonal Street and Goethe on Main.
Subtitled “Dancing all over Johannesburg” the programming is national as well as international in the sense that notable SA dance makers living abroad are featured. Brussels-based dancer and choreographer Moya Michael, who has been dancing with Rosas in Belgium and Akram Khan’s company in London, will create a personal, solo “Out of this Body… for a Little While”, in residence at Dance Space in Newtown. Michael will be brought to SA by the Embassy of Belgium Delegation of the Flemish Government.
Festival favourites include Boyzie Cekwana with a three- minute intervention “a thinking out loud experiment, Robyn Orlin and her now epic 1999 piece of Joburgiana “Daddy, I’ve seen this piece six times before and I still don’t know why they are hurting each other” and Madagascar-based Moeketsi Koena in “Just We”, a duet.
Melody Putu, one of the pioneering male dancers of the 1980s and 1990s, with the Pact Dance Company and State Theatre Dance Company, makes a comeback as a choreographer. Now based in Sweden with the Skanes Dansteater, in Malmo, he has created Faith for Marie Brolin-Tani’s Young Fuse Dance Company project incorporating Cape Town’s Akhona Maqhina and Dance Factory’s Tshepo Zasekhaya.
There’s no shortage of icons. Apart from Orlin and Cekwana, Alfred Hinkel and Jay Pather are joining in the creative fray. Pather is remounting his site specific interdisciplinary Shakespeare inspired spectacular Qaphela Caesar! in Diagonal Street and Hinkel, now living and working in Okiep Namaqualand, is premiering Dansmetdieduiwels. This work, dealing with issues of religion “sex, sexuality and its relationship with women and children” is set in the Northern Cape and carries a no under 16 age restriction.
As does activist artist PJ Sabbagha’s One Night Stand, which zooms in on “the infection of sex, intimacy and desire” and Dada Masilo’s thought provoking Death and the Maidens, an exposition of misogyny in religion. The taboo subject of child abuse is also the subject of Dance Umbrella 2012’s poster girl Mari-Louise Basson’s “uncle stans jane and john doe” performed by Mzansi Productions, and not Tshwane Dance Theatre as originally announced.
Experimentation breezes in via collaborations. The Dance Forum grant commission is First Physical Theatre Company’s Alan Parker and Juanita Finestone-Praeg’s Cellardoor from Grahamstown. It will share a triple bill with Cape Town’s Louise Coetzer plus graffiti artist Imraan in Canvas and Athena Mazarakis and her German-based Spanish collaborator Hansel Nezza. Their Inter.Fear interrogates fear as experienced by people living in Joburg, Berlin and Barcelona. After the success of Hotel, Moving Into Dance Mophatong Dance Company again joins Mark Hawkins this time airing celebrity mad SA’s murky obsessions in Dirty Laundry.
History looms large this year. Gregory Maqoma unleashes his Exit/Exist, directed by James Ngcobo, which pays homage to his famed 18th Century ancestor Chief Jongumsobomvu Maqoma, while Vincent Sekwati Koko Mantsoe wrestles with shebeen culture of the 1970s and 1980s in Opera for Fools. Desire Davids expresses her personal history and mixed-race identity in her multimedia solo Who is this? Beneath my Skin?, courtesy of the French Insitute of South Africa.
So many questions, so many intriguing answers…
• Dance Umbrella will run from February 17 to March 4. Tickets R30 to R100. Book at Computicket. For Goodman on Main and Old Stock Exchange performances, call 011 492 2033. Block bookings at 083 570 3083.