Just reading about performance artist Anthea Moys’ work puts a smile on your face. Whether she’s turned herself into a human ball for a team of rugby players to fling between one another or sits on a stationary racing bike during a cycle race, there’s a playfulness about her work which doesn’t detract from the serious questions she’s asking with every experiment she puts out.
Exploring the art of conducting and performance, she is working on Misconduct which is part of the Joburg International Mozart Festival and will be performed on Sunday at 3pm at the Linder Auditorium.
“The conductor will attempt to conduct an orchestra of about 25 dancers instead of musicians. In re-imagining this ‘new kind of orchestra’, the dancers will use their bodies to respond and reinterpret the conductor’s movements as he ‘conducts’ a piece of silent music which only he can hear,” she says.
Directed and conceptualised by Moys, she explains that she has been experimenting with conductors and musicians for a while now. Her interest started because she would attend the final rehearsals of the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra and sit staring at the different relationships happening on stage: “I would wonder about the music being played, where everyone should be in a specific context and the fact that it has been said: a conductor isn’t like a choreographer but is simply rearranging the music.”
Her first piece focusing on these musical relationships had three conductors, Richard Cock, Matheu Kieswetter and Mokale Kaopeng conducting one violin player, Valery Andreev: “I am fascinated by how conductors bring music to life – how with simple facial expressions and body movements, one person can mould and shape the music played by an entire orchestra.”
Sunday’s performance still has the musical slant but with different dimensions.
“It’s an experiment,” she stresses. But so is all her work which always as its bedrock has a playfulness that is wonderfully enchanting.
Misconduct involves the dancers from Moving Into Dance conducted by, again, Kieswetter, choreographed by Joni Barnard and directed by Moys.
These past two weeks they have had a series of workshops to work on the premise that dancers stand in for the musicians.
“Instead of playing instruments, the dancers will use their bodies to interpret the conductor’s cues, as he ‘conducts’ a piece of silent, physical music. They will never hear the piece of music until the day of the performance when, after they have performed their silent piece of music, they will then dance for the first time to the actual piece of music. It’s about creating different responses,” says Moys, who will know while working with the dancers and the conductor what the music is. Already she and her choreographer have had arguments.
“I want that high element of risk while she wants it to be more ordered,” she notes.
But there’s a reason why she chooses the people she works with – all of these disagreements add to the weight of work.
In the meeting with the conductor these past weeks, the dancers would have learnt about conducting, the way he uses his arms and movement to get what he wants from an orchestra. “It’s about forming a relationship between the conductor and the dancers,” says Moys so that they can react specifically, not randomly, as they dance to silent music.
“I can’t say what the music is, but it is Mozart and deals with battles between the lower classes and the bourgeoisie,” yet Moys doesn’t like to be prescriptive or too interpretive about her work.
“It is about asking questions,” she says and hopefully the performance will inspire audiences.
“It’s a bit of a puzzle. It is about examining existing (in this instance) power relationships and how they work.”
What happens when you fiddle with these expected responses? It’s about the discomfort, about the way people experience the unexpected and about tweaking their thought processes to look at something familiar in a new way. But it’s also mischievous, says Moys, which is an element that will always be present in her work.
In the future, she hopes to push her own boundaries by studying further in the field of psychology.
But rather than desert her passion as a performance artist, she hopes to extend the dimensions she has been working in.