“It’s Shaka Zulu not f***ing Mickey Mouse,” yells the dramaturge in Constanza Macras’s new work, On Fire: The Invention of Tradition, which opened Dance Umbrella last Thursday at the Dance Factory in Newtown. The piece explores and re-evaluates heritage and tradition in our fragmented, urbanised world.
A cast of 12 local and Berlin-based dancers and performers present this fiercely satirical work that draws from soap operas and clichés to pick away at the complex and tangled social fibres we negotiate today.
Sound, visual, costume and narration are an important part of director/choreographer Macras’s work. Her style evokes all the senses, and pushes against the boundaries of contemporary dance. This piece begins with the sound of rain. A dancer moves onto the stage and slowly makes his way diagonally across it into a rectangle pool of water projected onto the stage from above. As he moves in this video water, another dancer joins him and they engage in a gentle dialogue of fluid dips and touches. The sound of birds breaks through the rain and the two dancers’ movements echo this, becoming jittery. They preen and flap and strut before exiting amid a deafening chorus of whistles.
This dance is followed by another evoking earth and then fire, which ends with them literally tearing up the stage. Then a video projected on the back wall of the stage transports us to a koppie overlooking the city of Joburg where the performers, dressed in stark tennis whites with antique rackets and golf clubs, casually “knock about” white teacups that explode in puffs of ceramic dust.
The narrative returns to the stage and the dancers gather into a group and then freeze in a perfect group portrait. They stare fixedly for a few seconds and then the image dissolves and they move away. Photographs by visual artist Ayanda V Jackson are projected on two sheets hanging from the ceiling. The images are highly staged neo-classical portraits. In front of these the cast re-assembles and breaks away from the chorus to a booming operatic score.
Jackson’s work is concerned with identity and representation of the black female body. Although she creates photographs, Jackson is a performer as she poses in front of the camera for her works. From the archive, she revives female characters and embodies them, performing them again with her own body, to re-stage the scene and relive and retrace their narratives, allowing them to be complicit in their own representation rather than a subject of it.
The dancers’ movements, juxtaposed with Jackson’s static images, are short and sharp, reminiscent of the flickering of an old movie.
In On Fire, Jackson’s images depict a staging of identity, which the dancers then bring to life. These layers break down the static colonial/ patriarchal representations of the other and begin to allow new stories to arise that are collaborative, collective responses with the dancers adding their voices to the dialogue that their bodies are performing.
The piece then segues from the abstract into a full-blown soap opera. The credit roll for this TV series is projected onto the sheets. Evoking the slow-motion product shots that characterise advertising, each performer begins to pour some packaged food into their mouths. But the custard, canned spaghetti tomato sauce and milk spill out of their mouths and over their faces, drip down their throats and run onto their white shirtfronts. The sexy quickly becomes the grotesque.
On Fire is deliberately pared back with the lighting and rough brickwork showing – there are no illusions of a “stage” here, but the OTT soapie aesthetic creates a fake layer of reality, complicating the notion of a “staged” reality.
The open-ended plot lines of soapies and character types make this a universal cultural playground in which characters and stories become interchangeable and replicable. Into this space Macras choreographs a parody narrative in which African bodies are packaged to be sold – wrapped up in traditional garb and shipped off for Chinese audiences. In this commercial context, what is authenticity measured against? As the dancers perform a traditional Zulu dance, the dramaturge struts up and down assessing the “display”, unimpressed by this apparent Mickey Mouse rendition of Shaka Zulu.
On Fire ends with a live game of tennis. Two dancers engage in a short volley of shots accompanied by ridiculous exclamations, before each smashing a white china teacup against the back wall of the set.
• Leiman is a participant of the Dance Writer’s Workshop sponsored by the Goethe-Institut.