LAST week’s Baxter Dance Festival was bursting with energetic dancers, some familiar choreographers and local companies, but the programmers saved the best for last.
It’s not that there were bad dancers or boring choreographers, it’s just that the productions became exponentially more complex as the week went on.
One constant refrain throughout, though, was Thalia Laric and Steven van Wyk’s commissioned work, Mode, which gave singer Robin Botha ample opportunity to show off her vocal range. The quartet of dancers handled the exacting piece with assurance and ease, always a crowd pleaser.
The Eoan Group were by far the most visible of local dance companies with three varied performances on the main programme, plus two on the off-main programme. Their skills level continues to improve – their ensemble work is strong – and Mishka Medell is becoming more confident in her own style of choreography, though it was still very sweet to see her mother, Abeedah, dance with the group in Splitting Images.
Debbie Turner’s Cape Academy of Performing Arts students were also much in evidence, with several of the former students dancing as Cape Dance Company for Belinda Nusser’s Fade Out Five on the main programme, with Mthuthuzeli November showing off a level of polish that should see him highlighted in CDC’s showcase later this year. He has clearly been working hard.
While the programme gave ample notes about what choreographers had planned, themes and messages weren’t always apparent to the audience. Multimedia wasn’t much in evidence, and the less- than-enthusiastic response to Horses Heads Company’s SIMIlar pretty much summed up the audience’s aversion to anything that didn’t move fast and in a fairly straight-forward presentation.
After a second performance that was more adroit performance art than strictly traditional dancing per se, one grumpy person said: “Maar wa’s ‘ie dans?” to which I replied: “Just wait”, knowing full well that FO8 Dance Collective were up next and they did not disappoint.
They have changed their soundtrack since their CT Fringe Festival performance (for the better) and had people on their feet after a poignant, lyrical and, above all, passionate and focused performance. The Architecture of Tears reminds you that it isn’t just sad emotions that make you cry, it is the intensity of the emotion that turns on the waterworks.
Coming back to the performance art. Levern Botha (First Physical Theatre) made a welcome return to the Cape Town stage with Athina Vahler’s Deadringer – a hybrid work which combined the physicality of the boxing world with dance.
By the time she ended with a reprise of the routine she’d begun with, that first sequence made a whole lot more sense, as she was playing on the idea of identity –at one point challenging the audience with the words “you don’t know who I am” and then proceeding to show us.
Mamela Nyamza, too, got her own dig in about audience expectations and her own identity when she posed those questions she gets asked over and over like, “what do your family think of what you do?” or “why did you choose ballet and not African dance?” in Wena Mamela. Drawing on word play around the phatic communication “yoh” she eventually modulated this to “you”, throwing the questions right back at the audience, again pointing out that we don’t necessarily understand who she is, but what do our questions to her say about us and the way we think?
When it comes to theme, Mzo Gaza of Sibonelo Dance Project went political with his Ababhidisi – The Conductors and his message came through loud and clear – that there are leaders in society leading people down dangerous paths which makes people lose their connection to community and a sense of right and wrong. He effectively mixed up different dance styles, over a disturbing soundtrack.
Head of the UCT Dance Department, Lisa Wilson, and Janine Booysen also took UCT Footprints Repertory Dance into touchy territory with Uprising. Their work was inspired by injustices perpetrated against women, but this led into a stirring invocation for women to fight back, rather than simply leaving it as a portrait of contemporary conditions.
Despite the huge programme and dealing with hundreds of dancers and technical hiccups, festival director Nicolette Moses still managed to create a well-organised showcase of the state of dance in the Western Cape – which basically seems to be well-nourished in the creativity stakes, full of eager young dancers who are sometimes more enthusiastic than necessarily technically proficient and companies that are trying really hard, but which are seriously underfunded.