When dance companies from two different countries collaborate across geographical and cultural lines there are two possible outcomes. Either an imposed mish-mash or an organically sound creation.
Then there’s the third, more risky, option: a work that pushes every conceivable button in its creative processes so that the stage detonates with intention and invention. Somewhere, out there, life was screaming, co-created by Joburg’s The Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative (FATC) and Reunion Island’s Danses en l’R! falls into this category.
It took nine years before FATC’s PJ Sabbagha and Danses en l’R!’s Eric Languet realised their wish to work together. When Somewhere ... premiered at the Drama for Life Sex Actually Festival in The Wits Theatre last Thursday their joint creativity, fluid visions and the obstacles they encounter as dance-makers running companies were evident. Making art or sustaining a professional dance company either in Africa or on an Indian Ocean Island (which is part of France) is far from easy. All those frictions and tensions astutely inform this sensory onslaught which pulses with visceral intelligence and corroding physicality.
How this piece, which dovetails as installation performance, was made in a crossed residency between St Gilles and Joburg in the past months, is a case study on its own. FATC not only swopped homes midstream – from Wits University to the University of Johannesburg – but the cast changed. Two weeks ago Nicholas Aphane left FATC and Thabo Kobeli had to step in at a very advanced stage.
The performers are Reunion’s Mariyya Evrard, Soraya Thomas and FATC’s Thami Majela, Ivan Teme and Kobeli.
Given that the five dancers are not only co-creators of the performed material but they have – as part of the choreography – to manipulate projected visuals (created by sensational French artist Elie Blanchard), this was no mean feat. Interactivity is key: for example, Teme transposes the projected triangular imagery into his body. A central theme is how the individual is affected by structures, order, symbolised by a pyramid which occurs either as an object, in a pile of sand, projected symbols or on video.
The anarchic tone of this hour-long work choreographed by Languet, assisted by Sabbagha’s directorial eye, underpins what is in essence aesthetic cartography which maps ingested ideas, reveals secrets, blasts ideologies. Fabrice Planquette’s excellent sound score; Elie Blanchard’s video and design elements and Thabo Pule and Mandla Mtshali’s lighting, conspire with the vocabulary which is embedded in personal reactions and interactions. The strategies and exercises Languet used to source this choreographic material are not unfamiliar, but the intensity of how it is realised gives it an authentic spin.
The collaborating artists rupture physical and psychic space with a bombardment of imagery and texts – verbal, physical, visual and performed – which tend to explode or implode. Mariyya Evrard is a pivotal figure. As a mainly catatonic outsider her stillness, her detachment, provides a measure for the chaos erupting around her.
Somewhere, out there, someone was screaming, which is part of the France-South Africa Season, demands not only to be viewed but listened to and perceived. The bodies in frantic motion, or in silhouetted repose, mercurially shift between the real, the surreal, the realised and the imagined.
• Somewhere, out there, life was screaming closes the Jomba! Contemporary Dance Experience at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre, in Durban, on September 8 and 9. In November it travels to Reunion Island’s Total Danse Festival and to the Instances festival, in France.
• FATC performs Shanell Winlock’s Be Still ... (2012) at Dance Umbrella 2 @ Arts Alive at The Market Theatre on September 4 and 5, at 8pm.
• PJ Sabbagha’s One Night Stand (2012) will be re-staged at The Soweto Theatre as part of the African Dance Biennale (September 28 - October 6).
• FATC takes a reworked I think its Hamlet (2011) to Taipei, Taiwan, from October 7-14.
• Dansbytes showcasing new choreography is at the Con Cowan Theatre, University of Johannesburg from October 24-27.