‘Sies! It really is getting a bit hard core,” says the choreographer to the composer, whose score emits a chain reaction of orgasmic cries.
Nicho Aphane, who darts back and forth from the rehearsal floor to his music-making laptop, takes the playful note from PJ Sabbagha but continues echoing what his own voice emits when he is creating a solo for One Night Stand. There’s a fine line between eroticism and pornography in this delicate creation process happening on the 16th floor.
The title for this The Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative (FATC) work (which carries a no under 16 age restriction) has the obvious sexual connotation – but this term’s origin is theatrical, as Sabbagha painstakingly points out. That’s a perfect fit of this risk-taking dance company he co-founded 16 years ago with Tracey Human at Wits University where the collaborative is resident for a second year running.
What Dance Umbrella audiences will discover when One Night Stand premieres in The Wits Theatre is that the theatre collaborative has substantially changed.
When it held auditions last year for the senior and trainee ensembles (thanks to three-year lottery funding now in its second tranche) 70 male dancers (yes 70) flooded in from around the country. That’s why, with the departure of Dada Masilo (pursuing her own repertory this year) and Lulu Mlangeni (who will guest for Ivan Teme’s invited Umbrella entry Unknown Equation) the dancers are exclusively male. A female presence can be engineered with intern Tertia Coetzee, who was with Tshwane Dance Theatre in 2011.
Other new FATC bodies, joining seasoned stalwarts Aphane, Songezo Mcilizeli, Ivan Teme and Thami Majela, are Vuyani Dance Theatre’s Thabo Kobeli and Charlston van Rooyen (trained at Jazzart). The intern intake is completed by two University of Natal drama graduates, Bonwa Mbontsi (a top 16 favourite in the second SA season of TV’s So You Think You Can Dance) and Ryan Mayne; Wits drama graduate Nyaniso Dzedze and Sibikwa’s Thapelo Kotolo.
Part of the attraction for these dancers must be PJ Sabbagha’s reputation as an adventurous dance maker, superb teacher and activist artist who doesn’t pay lip-service to what concerns him. For the past 11 years the collaborative has been making highly artistic, dramatic dance works about HIV. In 2005, when he was the Standard Bank Young Artist for dance, this Rhodes Drama graduate and a founder member of the First Physical Theatre Company discovered his HIV status and publicly disclosed it.
Deep Night (which dealt with promiscuity in Joburg nightclubs and the link to HIV infection) toured dance festivals in Mali, Madagascar and Mozambique in 2010 and 2011. It’s no accident the latest creation is titled One Night Stand. “That’s intentional,” he says. “There’s dialogue with Deep Night, but this one is not nightclubby at all. In our rehearsals we have spoken about how our lives are infected every day. About taking risks. How to transfer a thought. Infection doesn’t have to be biological, it can be conceptual.
“Through structured improvisation the group has constructed a meaning. In performance we have to keep that sense of spontaneity and chance, so each performance is a one-night stand – in the theatrical sense.”
Referring to the age restriction, which FATC has imposed on other pieces, Sabbagha and Human are concerned about the implicit ambiguities in the performance and choreography which could be missed, or misconstrued, by young people.
In the studio the work takes shape from fluorescent green and pink post-its on a flip chart repre- senting images produced from improvisation. “The piece is not dancey-dancey, it is chaotic and mad,” grins the man who cele- brated his 40th birthday on January 27.
Instead of feeling a midlife crisis, Peter John Sabbagha is relieved. “Now if people don’t get my work then there are others who will go on the journey with me. Before I was maybe concerned with providing narrative, pathos and drama. Now the work is more layered and conceptual.”
• See One Night Stand debut at Dance Umbrella 2012, at The Wits Theatre at 7pm on February 23 and 24. Book at Computicket.