The true measure of a good tertiary performing arts institution is how the former students take their acquired skills into the world.
On that score, alone, the Tshwane University of Technology’s Dance and Musical Theatre department qualifies with flying colours. Scores of triple threat (actor-singer-dancers) musical theatre graduates have excelled in imported Broadway shows and specifically the homegrown African Footprint.
This commercial theatre dance course, introduced in 1986, is part of a very important facet of South African contemporary dance development. In 1981 lecturer Susan Botha, a ballet teacher and dance visionary (with overseas experience), and part-time music lecturer Josef du Preez took a huge leap of faith, with the blessing of rector Josias van der Merwe, and started a one-year ballet course with six students.
That seed of the Technikon Ballet Department grew into an institution which not only roped in top-quality ballet, contemporary, jazz and Spanish teachers, but commissioned Johannesburg choreographers the calibre of Sonje Mayo, Robyn Orlin, Debbie Rakusin and Marlene Blom. In the early 1990s, as they started out, Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe, Boyzie Cekwana, Moeketsie Koena, Sello Pesa and David Matamela joined this list.
Verkrampte Pretoria, and not “liberal” Johannesburg, at the height of apartheid, seemed an unlikely place for an artistic revolution which gradually included dancers from Soweto, Gugulethu, Galeshewe, Taung and other townships and cities around the country. Graduates such as Cape Town’s Mamela Nyamza (the 2011 Standard Bank Young Artist for Dance) join local professional dance companies then develop their own independent careers and/or dance in international productions like The Lion King and Matthew Bourne’s all-male Swan Lake.
Part of this enduring legacy are the five biennial national/international ballet competitions (1987-1995) which highlighted future ballerinas Anne Wixley and Burnise Silvius and notable dancers including Gavin Louis, Robin van Wyk and Warren Adams.
Three decades on, the Technikon Dance Department, renamed the Tshwane University of Technology in 2004, has the same mission of skilling, empowering, enlightening and nurturing, which it did from the word go.
Fittingly, TUT’s annual dance season is titled 30 Something. At the opening night, on June 1, at the Breytenbach Theatre, the midwives – Botha (now at the University of Cape Town School of Dance), Du Preez, Van der Merwe and Vicki Karras (head of department 1998-2007) – were proudly in attendance.
The programme is a core sample of what TUT takes from the classroom and studio floor to the stage. The execution of Karras’s impeccable staging of Les Patineurs, Frederic Ashton’s exacting 1937 skating ballet, is far from perfect, but illustrates the demands of classical technique and that there are no shortcuts in respecting traditions.
That attention to technical facility and detail pays off in the rest of the evening filled with choreography by four alumni. Chanel Gomes’s Precious Things, danced by five young women obsessed with frilly white dresses and the purity they represent, signals a thoughtful young dance maker who is grappling with feminist issues and how to avoid predictable vocabulary. The sweet waltzing young things are damaged by unseen forces.
Debra Gush’s crowd-pleasing finale Ha! unleashes pointe work, gumboots and jazzy tap. The large cast features 10 highly proficient South African men (this work should carry a hormone rush warning).
The triumph of the evening is Timothy le Roux’s compelling Death of Memories (which travels to the National Arts Festival Arena in Grahamstown). Masculinity and femininity, white consciousness and black conscious, seep into the 18 bodies. Beautiful arabesques, jumps and lifts collapse, contort and distort in moulded duets and ensembles. Lyrical torsos convulse rhythmically as they are hit by invisible solar plexus punches.
This vortex of action is punctuated by an emotional subtext of angst, despair, nostalgia and wisps of hope. Corpses float in the air in a dreamscape thick with corroding physicality. Monuments dissolve. Particularly mesmerising were Kingsley Beukes, Xola Willie, Khaya Ndlovu, Mokone Qobolo and first-year Evan van Soest.
Timothy le Roux’s crumbling symphony of human expression is performed to a collage of Depeche Mode, etc. Get the man a composer. He has earned one.
l30 Something runs until Saturday at 8pm.