Athi-Patra Ruga is difficult to miss. For one, he has short, bright, blond hair. He walks as if he is careful not to let the soles of his feet touch the ground.
As with his appearance, provocative productions that often include video, hand-embroidered textile works and, of course, performance, Ruga’s work is hard to ignore.
Fresh from its New York debut, Ruga’s latest work, Ilulwane, will be showcased at this year’s Infecting the City festival.
In the 45-minute-long Ilulwane, which will be performed at the Long Street Baths on Wednesday and Friday, Ruga will be covered head to toe (including his face) in lace and other fabric and surrounded by synchronised swimmers who were coached by Sue Manners-Wood.
“People see synchronised swimming as this cute ballet activity, but it’s an olympic sport,” Ruga tells me. “People go in there wanting to crush skulls so there’s this athletic masculinity and then there’s femininity as well.”
I follow Ruga until he makes himself comfortable on top of his work table in his Sea Point studio.
”In 2010 I had this character,” he reaches for a marker and writes a word on the table, “her name was Beiruth. I killed that character to give birth to Ilulwane,” he says.
“ ‘Ilulwane’ is an Nguni name for ‘bat’, but it’s also used in contemporary Xhosa culture to describe a man who’s been to the mountain, to initiation, but didn’t complete the rite of passage.
“These men are called that because sometimes there are parents who are anti-tradition and don’t send their sons (to initiation school), or those parents who are afraid their sons will get an infection.”
For this production, Ruga says: “I was interested in this as being a matter of life and death. Because then these men have to decide to go to these hospitals that are also anti-initiation school.”
As expected, the ilulwane don’t get the same praise as the initiates who don’t leave the mountain to seek medical attention, or those who are circumcised in a hospital.
Having been to the mountain and back without medical intervention in 2004, Ruga says: “Ilulwane is personal because my brothers were labelled that and it’s also something that affected me because I am a homosexual.”
He explains that “my sexuality puts me away from being seen as a man in Xhosa culture”.
Added to that, there is another layer to peel off in Ruga’s work. He shares: “Ilulwane, a bat, is neither bird nor mouse, so there is that shape-shifting element.”
But why a bat?
“When I decided to work on Ilulwane, the first image I saw in my mind was Dracula. I thought of Bela Lugosi and the high collar and big bat wings,” he says before he explains that in the water and the costumes is a motif of red and white that harks back to the types of blankets initiates wear.
I ask him why the costume covers his face as well. “First, I used lace because it’s something that is very drag and drag is like my modus operandi,” he says.
“But in all my work there’s always an element of blindness, or where my hands don’t work. That’s my style.”
Being an avid believer in “not usually leaning towards having one narrative in my work”, Ruga approaches issues around masculinity by using the Xhosa initiation tradition, the history of the Castrati and the subculture of “cruising” to make his point.
What’s cruising, you ask? Usually in mazes, explains Ruga, cruising is when gay men check out other men in a venue and decide who they’d like to pursue for pleasure. Those places are for males only, just like the Long Street Baths, which is where Ilulwane will be shown.
“The narrative of cruising also came from when Bette Midler did something influential. She’d perform with her little keyboard in the areas people were cruising. So it’s like sitting and enjoying a classy concert in between f***ing. Cruising is a rite of passage from boy to man too, though.”
The artist throws his head back in laughter, then says seriously: “There has to be ascendance through the work and a dignity in all of this. The castrated new man whose penis is under question must know there’s a new story. A point of change, a crossroads in South Africa where people dig for conversation.”
• Ilulwane: Wednesday, 9pm, Friday, 8.45pm, Long St Baths.