‘Have I ever really danced at all?” reflected Faustin Linyekula, the renowned choreographer from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) during Le Cargo. It was a seemingly perplexing question, given his extensive career and high profile as a dancer – and his presence at the Danse L’Afrique Danse! Biennale.
For the first time during this extensive dance event in Joburg, someone was trying to pin down dance’s ephemeral character. Ideally it should exist outside geography and politics, proposed Linyekula. In other words, its essential abstract mode denies it ever being fixed to something as concrete as a place or the politics attached to it. Ironically, the name of this pan-African dance festival, which was conceived by the French for Africans in Luanda in 1995, ties the work to a place, a continent and an envisioned choreographic landscape reflecting, what Agnes Izrine, editor-in-chief of Danser, dubs “true African” expression.
Predictably, this ambiguous if not unattainable quality failed to emerge from the diverse works from the 44 choreographers during this 10-day festival that played out in venues around Joburg. In fact, the festival was marked by a lack of coherency of any kind. There was no overarching theoretical framework that may have created links between works, or at least ensured they were loosely in dialogue with one another, as is the case with a biennale. Instead, a hodgepodge of choreography was densely packed into a tight schedule – up to seven works were shown daily – that shifted according to the whims of the French team behind the event, to adjust to the requirements of the large contingent of members of the French press, who they had flown in to cover the event. This left local audiences in a tailspin, unable to process the breadth of the work on show, and sometimes frustrated – performances either began very late or early without advance notification.
The performers battled too; many works were compromised because of the tight schedule, which left insufficient time to rehearse or resolve technical issues.
The French can certainly boast ownership of this event, and they should be commended for their efforts to sustain and support contemporary dance on the continent. This iteration of the biennale formed part of the burgeoning France/SA Season 2012/2013, which has already seen a variety of French works staged in this country or collaborations with artists from both countries.
At its heart, this programme is meant to foster exchange and improve understanding between the two countries. In a very real way this biennale raised some pertinent questions around the nature of this cultural agreement. Is there something fundamentally wrong with the French packaging (the selection of works were done in Paris, by the French – Sophie Renaud is the director of the artistic exchange and Co-operation department) an African dance event for Africans?
The selection of some of the works for this biennale was puzzling; those who have attended previous ones – this is its ninth edition – were grumbling about the fact that some of the “dregs” of African choreography had washed up on our shores. Is the significance of this event then to function as a survey of how the French “read” African cultural products? Given the skewed historical relations between Africa and Europe, which have forced Africans to view their culture through an European prism, should this dynamic still be encouraged, or have we transcended this vexed history? These are predicatable questions. Perhaps too expected. So far during the France/ SA Season 2012/2013 they have not been raised. Is the past better left untouched in the drive to cement a bond between the two countries? If this exchange is meant to have any authentic long-term results, as is the intention of those at the top driving the season, surely there needs to be some level of sensitivity around past and current power dynamics.
These issues haunted this event, and were echoed in the organisational politics behind the scenes, which may have affected how locals perceived it – those who attended, and chose not to. Local audiences were conspicuously absent. This created an atmosphere where it felt as if this French-engineered event was designed for the French press and, by proxy, the French public at home.
This is clearly not an unusual phenomenon for the African dance fraternity; Linyekula’s self-reflexive piece was a sardonic exploration of the significance of relaying the impact of the dire political and social issues in his homeland to a foreign audience. It was the futility of this activity that he lamented. It wasn’t only that the intended audience would be unable to fully grasp the conditions, but it wouldn’t change them either, even if they could. “What if I told you about a man who died from the plague? People are still dying from the plague, does that matter?”
His cynicism had been shaped by years of performing, evoking aspects of life in his homeland for foreign audiences, yet he cannot release himself from this compulsion, despite his awareness of its futility. Linyekula is not free to immerse himself in dance because he has been forced into the role of a narrator, something he laments – and relishes. In Le Cargo, he vacillates between addressing the audience from a carved wooden stool – as if we are gathered around him in a village, under a tree – to moving his slight, sinewy body to music in front of bright footlights placed around the stage.
In this way he adopts two different modes of address; textual and visual. The latter is more abstract, it fills the silences in the texts, it tells us what he cannot say: the memories of his life in the DRC that linger in his body. It is in his body that he holds the memory of dances that are no longer enacted in his village – not only has physical infrastructure disintegrated in his home town, but also the social frameworks that support dance. And so, ultimately, the story he tells is one of loss that simultaneously acts as a mode of retrieval. Is this (contemporary) dance? For him it is the memory of dance, which is quite a different thing altogether.
Linyekula’s gentle and unassuming work is in contrast to the energetic choreography in Wake Up, a collaborative piece by Gregory Maqoma and Florent Mahoukou from the Republic of Congo. The music is uncharacteristically fast-paced for a Maqoma work; though the loose shoulder work and fluid phrases seem familiar, the work has a different flavour; it feels anxious, more contrived, perhaps too stylised. In Heimat, Jérôme Brabant of Reunion strips dance down to its basic character. By strapping different sized triangles to his body, he shifts a repetitive and meditative movement on a confined stage. It is not simply about negotiating different weights or extensions to the body, but creating a kind of sensitivity around it that draws attention to how easily movement is manipulated by space and objects - the habits it imposes.
Taoufiq Izeddiou (from Morocco) is not your conventional dancer. This paunchy character totters clumsily around in the darkened area of the stage, screaming, singing, ululating like an exotic bird until he finally stands in front of the stage lights that divide it. Here he transforms into a performer with stylised gestures and the signatures of a drag artist. The build-up to this moment implies a ritual in preparation of performance, an erasing of the self.
In Laisse-moi Parler(Let Me Speak) Jacques Banyanga, also from the DRC, and his troupe of costumed dancers, dressed like players from a period play, seem trapped in banal choreography that feels so contrived; it’s as if they are caught, limited by the theatrics of dance. A language which has throttled the truth they wish to relay. Moeketsi Koena and Haja Saranouffi (from Madagascar) lay the mechanics of performance bare, separating out each part; the costume, the sound, even emotions can be interchangeable. They appear to have the freedom to keep re-determining these elements but they rarely transcend or subvert the clichéd units of performance and dance they reproduce.
Sello Pesa (in collaboration with Vaughn Sadie) completely breaks with theatrical devices in Inhabitant, though he retains a line of chairs designating an area for a seated audience, which are placed on the pavement of a busy street in Newtown. While a performance of generic government speech-making takes place, Pesa and Brian Mtembu roll across the busy street during peak-hour traffic. They carefully negotiate their bodies between speeding taxis and perplexed motorists who weren’t sure what these seemingly impassive bodies were doing in the street as they slowed down to navigate around them. Pesa and Mtembu move from lying passively in the street to walking across it, like ordinary pedestrians. In this way, the two dancers oscillate between activity and inactivity; a kind of passive|resistance that is death defying to also conventionally testing and contesting ownership of public space – as an active pedestrian crossing a street.
This is a form of protest that parades as a duplication of passivity. In other words, using inaction as a powerful mode of action as realised through the body placed in a precarious situation. The reproduction of passivity works at protesting against the very condition it critiques. It brings to mind the actions of the lesbian feminists from the One in Nine Campaign last weekend during the Pride march where they lay on the|tarmac of the street, disrupting the flow of people down Jan Smuts Avenue. One young woman kept rolling her body across and down the busy thoroughfare, as the crowd of marchers drew closer. She was almost teasing the marchers, resisting the march and posing as an inactive participant, as a way of saying “We won’t take it [senseless killings of gay people] lying down” any more. Ironically, the action also evokes the redundancy of protest; can it really bring about change?
In the context of Pesa and Sadie’s work, they harness these ideas in an effort to evoke the power dynamics between the public and the state in a context where such relations are best observed – in public.
Boyzie Cekwana and Panaibra Gabriel Canda’s Inkomati (Dis)cord also dealt with political rhetoric – the Nkomati Accord signed by Samora Machel and PW Botha in 1984. This iconoclastic production, which was one of the highlights of Danse L’Afrique Danse!, also drew from text and a kind of static performance art.
Like Finyekula, the duo were involved in an act of retrieval, though this time it was a buried history.
Even the emotions tied to the past couldn’t be retrieved: the performers rotated a succession of white masks with generic expressions before posing inside a picture frame, where they reconstructed a photograph from the past.
What legacy will this dance biennale create? With a dearth of opportunities, for some it is sufficient that contemporary dancers and choreographers from the continent simply had another platform to perform on.
It is likely those dancers would have increased their profile in France. Presented under the banner of cultural exchange, perhaps we should expect more.