Dateline: Bamako, October 30, 2010. Blue-robed and veiled Tuareg men and women spontaneously dance in the dust, joyously interacting with each other within a tight circle after the Danse l’Afrique danse! parade had ended.
Their feet caress but don’t bruise the earth as they coax out ancient rhythms they live by in the Sahara, or express just as naturally in the gnarled concrete urban landscape. Standing next to me is dancer-choreographer Gregory Maqoma, who is serving on the Pan African competition jury and performing his legendary solo, Beautiful Me. He cannot contain his excitement. We are witnessing an authentic living heritage from Timbuktu.
Dateline: Joburg, January 19, 2011. The ensemble of Sunjata makes their entrance. They are moving in gentle circles. Their feet are not bashing the Barney Simon Theatre floor, but conjuring up myths and timeless truths. Their bodies interact and intermingle as they channel legendary tales of the West African griot traditions through their bodies, voices and imaginations into Newtown.
Would Maqoma have been able to achieve a lot of the choreographic textures of the potent imagery in this collaboration with director James Ngcobo, designer Nadia Cohen and the cast, if he had not been to West Africa since the mid-1990s? Or, specifically, to Mali for the African contemporary dance choreographic platform and Kettly Noel’s festival?
“No,” was the instant reply, on the morning after the Sunjata premiere. “For me being in Bamako helped immensely in understanding cultural differences. Also that appreciation of the simple gift of life. I was in the midst of people who live without all the things we take for granted. The dynamics of our piece are very West African.”
It also helped that everyone he asked about Sunjata, especially the cleaning woman at the hotel he was staying at on the banks of the River Niger, were delighted.
“She didn’t speak English so well. She was dying to tell me these stories. They learn them at school.”
Finding a theatrical common language, an ingenious shorthand, is something Ngcobo and Maqoma have been perfecting since their first encounter in staging Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel. When the director approached the busy dance professional last year he had no idea who Sunjata was – “I had to Google him” – or that he would be going to Mali.
This turned out to one of those serendipitous coincidences perfectly timed for creating an African performance piece which studiously avoids cliché or imitation. An aesthetic osmosis happens in the rehearsal room like it did with Thirst and during the evolution of Hugh Masekela’s Songs of Migration, which is back on the main stage downstairs.
“We had to make artistic choices to go the conventional or unconventional route in this physical approach to storytelling. We were avoiding what we did in The Lion and the Jewel. We were pushed into finding a new movement language. Sometimes the choreography replaces a whole page of words.
“When we started working we didn’t have a clue where we were going. We had to work from our own guts and energies. There was no written script, just the stories we were hearing and a book I bought in London.”
Experimentation rules. Not only does Conrad Kemp (a white actor) movingly play Sogolon (the great warrior Sunjata’s disabled mother) and the female-dominated ensemble interpret male roles, but the verbal language is Sepedi, isiXhosa and Bambara (with simultaneous English translation).
This creative symbiosis between the two griots of South African theatre has serious academic underpinnings. From February 12 to 26 Maqoma will be in residence at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, lecturing African studies and music department students on “Modernity and Tradition in Movement and Choreography”, based on the creation process of Beautiful Me. The inventive Sunjata is the next obvious candidate.