‘It is really hard to play an audience member and be a performer,” whispered Delia Meyer during a rehearsal of Sello Pesa’s new site-specific work, Tshwene ga ipone Makopo. We were standing at the entrance to the former Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s trading floor, which was in darkness while the performers took their place before we entered the quasi-ecclesiastic Seventies interior.
This once grand place is dilapidated, stained glass windows commemorating the five pillars of commerce are the only features that hint at its former glory. As well as above our makeshift stage, where large boards with slots supporting numbers that once marked the ebb and flow of the economy are situated. Meyer was wearing a fitted dress with a crotchet overlay that I came to recognise as her “audience member” outfit – usually she would arrive for rehearsals wearing jeans and T-shirts. Initially, I was perplexed as to why her get-up was insufficient, but as our first performance drew near I came to appreciate how this dress or costume allowed her to separate herself from her on stage persona
Meyer’s plight resonated with me for I, too, was operating as an audience member and performer in this production. In fact, the multitude of positions I assumed were more complex for not only was I posing as an audience member before taking to the stage to play myself, a journalist asking probing questions, but I was also participating in this production as a critic, observing the process of creating a performance piece. So for all sense and purposes I was an embedded journalist.
Embedded journalism isn’t usually associated with arts writing. Conventionally, we connect it to a slightly more dangerous activity: war reporting. The idea is that for reporters to discover the harsh realities at the frontlines of battles and perhaps gauge the mood of the soldiers as they advance towards their enemies they should travel with them, live in their shoes for a bit, so to speak.
I suppose there is less interest in what occurs at the front line of arts production – society, and critics for that matter, are usually more interested in the finished product. Of course, this hasn’t stopped arts journalists from sitting in on rehearsals or following artists about. Sometimes this is done to generate a bit of pre-publicity for a new production or for the critic, reporter, to gain a better understanding of the modus operandi of a particular performer, choreographer or director.
I intended to extend or deepen this kind of practice by assuming the role of observer and participant, while playing the two roles in the context of Pesa’s production. In this way I hoped to gain a more intimate understanding of how a dance work is developed, but also what it means to be a performer.
This wouldn’t be the first time I had tried my hand at this brand of embedded arts journalism. In 2010 I initiated a project with the artists Vaughn Sadie and Bronwyn Lace, with the express intention of dismantling the boundaries between art production and criticism. I wanted to discover how those divisions were constructed and what activities or processes they had in common. To this end we collaborated on an art installation for an exhibition at the FADA Gallery at the University of Johannesburg. The process was insightful: I discovered there was little difference between pondering and engaging with an art product and conceptualising one. I also realised that the process of making art was more dynamic than I had initially thought.
The critic Paul de Man made a similar observation when he admonished a literary critic for believing that an artwork “can lead us to the experience that produced the form”.
When Pesa asked me to participate in his new work for the Goethe Institut’s über(W)unden – Art in Troubled Times programme that would also be part of New Dance 2011, I didn’t hesitate. I had been here before. Or so I thought. The highly-politicised and racial theme underpinning Pesa’s work, however, proved challenging from a professional and personal point of view and I found myself scrambling to define or enforce the boundaries between myself and my stage persona. Could I draw a line?
“Tshwene ga ipone Makopo” is a Sepedi idiom that suggests “it is hard for people to notice their own mistakes but they always notice the mistakes in others”. The inspiration for the piece was derived from the “cabriolet toilet” debacle, where political parties were found to be responsible for building toilets without enclosures in wards under their control. Unsurprisingly, it was Julius Malema who cast this phenomenon as a racial one, implying that the DA’s leader, Helen Zille allowed, or tolerated this dehumanising phenomenon because she/her party “hated blacks”. Later it was discovered that there were 1 600 open toilets in an ANC-run ward.
Pesa appealed to Steve Biko’s rhetoric to explain this degrading phenomenon, implying it was the mind of the oppressed that stood in the way of true liberation. This sentiment would be expressed by Samora Ntsebeza during a mock-conference, which was the basis of the dance work. Initially, the performance would appear like an ordinary conference or political event, even when Humphrey Maleka danced Umshini Wami behind the podium, evoking President Jacob Zuma at a political rally. But the conference became disrupted and evolved into a series of absurd and metaphorical actions, pushing it into abstract territory thus blurring the boundary between life and art.
Towards the end of the performance I was to appear on a stage behind the audience and interview a fictitious political leader played by Thabo (Greg) Banda. It was a spontaneous exchange that shifted with each rehearsal and performance. Pesa and Sadie, responsible for the conceptual design, suggested after one rehearsal I should be more aggressive in my style of interviewing.
I felt uneasy about the suggestion as I was supposed to be “playing myself” and such behaviour is antithetical to my conduct in an interview situation. It then dawned on me that my function in the production was to evoke the archetypal critical white-voice, which is thought, particularly by the ANC, to be embodied in the white journalist/editor, whose critical stance is believed to be prejudiced by racial bias.
Pesa’s piece was populated by a number of archetypal characters, such as a coloured woman played by Kelly Botes, who changes into a garish outfit before enacting a typical Kaapse Klopse dance. I couldn’t possibly embody the role that Pesa and Sadie had envisioned for me, without the armour of a character, or on-stage persona.
“But when you are working as journalist you are playing a character,” Banda informed me one afternoon with a broad smile, revealing a chipped front tooth – a feature which, for some reason, proved a source of comfort under the watchful gaze of an audience.
“When you go home and you are eating dinner you are not a journalist then,” he explained.
William Kentridge’s performance of I am not me, The Horse is not Mine, which opened at the Market Theatre as part of the Refuse the Hour festival, provided some insight into my peculiar dilemma. Like Pesa’s work, Kentridge, too, had created a performance of a performance in the sense that his supposed “lecture” about his work and Nikolai Gogol’s short story The Nose was a theatrical performance. In this way Kentridge “played” himself, the artist, as well as making a performance of his explanation about his art-making. This division tied in with the theme of Gogol’s absurd tale of a Russian official whose nose disappears from his face. When he eventually tracks down his missing body part it refuses to acknowledge that it belongs to him.
The story evokes a divided self, explained Kentridge, before another version of himself appeared on the large screen behind him, drawing attention to this other self from another point in time. As the performance progressed it became clear that this celluloid persona represented his chaotic, artistic self. That is, the self with a propensity for irrational and absurd thoughts – and thus the unconscious self who is attracted to Gogol’s story and whose inner working he was supposed to explain as part of his “lecture”.
Kentridge implied that the rational self was always looking to explain and make sense of the flood of ideas generated by the artistic self. While doing this Kentridge mapped the origins of postmodern literature, reaching back to Cervantes’s seminal Don Quixote, deemed one of the first self-reflexive literary works. This kind of self-consciousness about the act of art-making, which we perceive as a postmodern impulse, is embodied in a critical/rational self that is constantly observing and processing – functioning much like an inner critic or journalist. So for all sense and purposes the two Kentridges in the performance embodied the critic and the artist, who were forced to reconcile with each other in the context of a lecture and performance.
The artist and theatremaker/performer are a set of contradictory selves that Kentridge has struggled to reconcile throughout his career, which started out on the stage. I am not me, the Horse is not Mine was one of the first times that these divergent personas felt completely united and at ease with each other as he delivered his best performance of an artist.
The extraordinary Congolese choreographer and dancer, Faustin Linyekula, who presented More, More, More Future as part of über(W)unden – Art in Troubled Times and New Dance 2011, also seemed haunted by a divided self.
Upon his return to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the primary driving concern in his work was to reconcile with his new identity as a Congolese – when he left the country of his birth he was Zairian, he explained during a keynote address at the Goethe Institut during the conference part of the programme. He saw dance as a tool to remember who he had been before and to grasp who he was in this reconfigured country, he said, beating his fist against his body as if it would offer him the answers.
Hence in More, More, More Future, the trio of dancers, which includes Dinozord and Papy Ebotani, dance to discover who they are, as well as to forget the heavy circumstances that plague their country by mindlessly immersing themselves in the seductive music played by a rock band on the stage, headed by the famous guitarist Flamme Kapaya. Their desire to forget seemed frenetic as they entered an almost meditative state in which they surrendered their bodies to the beats.
In such instances, they functioned like audience members in a club in downtown Kinshasa, who had come to listen to the band and the two singers, who shimmied around the stage in their dazzling suits. In this way the dancers vascillated between a kind of dance as we all know it on a dancefloor at a club or party to dancing as a form of artistic expression, where certain truths are revealed or expressed in an abstract language. Sometimes the boundary between responding to the music instinctively and with an informed intelligence seemed seamless.
As a result the line between receiving and creating art were blurred. During his address at the Goethe, Linyekula suggested that the dynamic between these two roles was conflicted. As the one kind of engagement restored one’s ability to dream and fantasise, imagine oneself to be elsewhere while the other, the artist’s mode, was steeped in conscious engagement with reality.
Ultimately it seemed that Linyekula was searching for a way to dream with his eyes open – to be both the audience member who is transported elsewhere and the artist who creates the context for a kind of transcendence.
Because I had always been a member of the audience I never really grasped the impact of their presence, though performers were always regaling about the influence of the audience’s “energy”.
On the night of our first performance I observed the audience closely, mimicking their reactions, so as to blend in. Their laughter was unexpected – their unease was palatable. They were disoriented; was Meyer, who was audibly complaining about the performance, for real? Their position was further destabilised when Maleka, under the guise of Zuma, broke into their physical space, pushing the lectern through them, forcing them out of their plastic chairs, their position of safety.
Some astute audience members would appreciate Pesa’s restrained choreography – every single action had been orchestrated. But they would never be privy to the subtle alterations that came about during each rehearsal and performance that brought me in closer touch with Pesa’s process of refining and redefining the line between life and art.
For this reason the audience struggled to detect the conclusion of the performance. The cast simply gravitated to a table, where the performance began and poured ourselves a cup of tea. Was this the end, some wondered among hesitant and scattered applause? Certainly, as I sipped my cup of tea I wasn’t sure when I had ceased performing and when the authentic me had returned. The shift was too subtle to detect.