Experimental work’s prose draws you in

A scene from Kalahari Swaan

A scene from Kalahari Swaan

Published Jul 21, 2015

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Short and abstract, Kalahari Swaan is an experimental tone poem. It combines dance, stylised physical performance, poetry, straight acting and staging reminiscent of Paul Grootboom’s Relativity: Township Stories.

The Artscape Arena stage is dominated by a washing line, suggestive of an ordinary backyard, but also serving as a means for one of the characters to show what she does when she is not at home.

The play is evocative, if a tad distancing – while the press info suggests a story, the piece itself lacks a narrative through-line, jumping as it does between characters. Apparently inspired by Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, this is about a struggle for a better life.

Completely in Afrikaans, it does contain some beautiful prose, especially in the young man’s poetic musings about the moon – he speaks to the moon at night, offering up his insight about what he wants out of life, but also how he sees himself.

As the name tells you the setting is the Kalahari and the man’s hypnotic lines are evocative of a dusty existence in a place of far away horizons and the swaan part comes through in his eventual delicate fluttering as he is, maybe, freed from this particular life.

The suggestion is there though, that the grandmother, played by Courtney Smith, feels estranged from her grandson who is living a very different life to hers. Her life is bound up in domestic routine, caring for a disabled grandchild – played with an impressive malleability by Kaylin Coetzee – and working as a domestic for a suggested other.

Jason Jacobs is the young man and Dustin Beck plays a silent fourth character, suggestive of a menacing influence, but he remains a cypher.

This is a different kind of offering from Artscape, not only because it is in Afrikaans, but in its philosophical reflection on coloured identity – not through an apartheid or Struggle lens, but within the context of how we are bound to the land, or not.

At 40 minutes it is very short, but the prose and strong characterisation from Smith’s grandma and Jacobs’s young man are worth more exploration.

Part of the New Voices programme at Artscape, this is a work in progress that could do with a stronger, more obvious narrative to allow the audience something to hold on to, but it already has an ephemeral allure that makes you want to find out more about these people.

It will be interesting to see where director/ writer Jacobs could take this.

l Kalahari Swaan runs at Artscape Arena until Sat, Tues to Sat at 8pm and 3pm on Sat.

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