Vuyani Dance Theatre (South Africa) @ TITAS
—Teresa Marrero
Vuyani Dance Theatre (South Africa): Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Boléro
TITAS/Dance Unbound
Staged at the Moody Performance Hall on April 7th (Good Friday) and 8th, Gregory Maqoma’s Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Boléro gripped the audience from the opening moments through its crescendo ending, leading us on an original, emotional and aesthetic journey that earned a long and enthusiastic standing ovation. The company, founded in 1999 by artistic director Maqoma, premiered this work in 2017 at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, South Africa, the former cradle of white segregationist Apartheid government policies and their bloody legacy. Cion is a collective reckoning of this painful past with a cathartic, liberating impulse.
Imagine a stage set full of crosses planted on the ground as one would find in a graveyard, with the initial whisper of sound coming from a hunched over person dressed in drab garb. He is weeping, begrudging the injustices done to the dead, while speaking unintelligible words (to a non-South African audience, at least) as he slowly makes his way across the stage. This work is about those who die by the hands of others.
The piece draws inspiration from two sources: Cion and the Ways of Dying (1995) and the music of French composer Maurice Ravel’s Boléro (1928). Ways of Dying is a novel by South African novelist and playwright Zakes Mda. The book follows the wanderings of Toloki, a professional mourner, as he traverses an unnamed South African city during the period of transition after Apartheid. Professional mourners are individuals whose work entails leading the grieving rituals by the living in honor of their dead. It has origins in Egyptian, Chinese, Mediterranean and nearby North African cultures. Ways of Dying examines nation-building, memory, loss and reintegration after the communal trauma of Apartheid. Maqoma grew up in Soweto, an all-black segregated township southwest of Johannesburg.
In the dance piece, the character of Toloki is singled out as a tall male figure wearing clothes different from the rest of the dancers and chorus: they are draped in dull grayish-green, with uneven hemlines. Toloki wears a sheath-like tunic that stops below the knees. The dancers and chorus, with one exception, perform barefooted. Toloki wears shoes.
Unless one focuses on the dancers with longer hair, one is hard-pressed to distinguish between the male and female dancers. Most of the males have shaved heads. Marking the difference between male and female comes into play mainly in the Plantation scene, where the reference points to the black slave migration in the Americas—another morbid legacy of white supremacy—that is portrayed through the violation of the Black woman’s body. In an ironic choice of opposite forces, purity and coyness on the part of Woman (Roseline Wilkens) is accompanied by the only oratory in English: how women must hate the fruit of their womb, the child that cannot be loved due to its violent origins. Otherwise, the intentional lack of differentiation between males and females may point to the fact that we all suffer in a similar manner as human beings.
It is through Toloki’s interactions with the dancers and the chorus that we understand power struggles, injustice, torture, loss, and eventual liberation. The demanding physicality of Gregory Maqoma´s concepts and choreography integrate eclectic dance traditions from Zulu and other African ritual movements to hip hop, African Contemporary dance, and Michael Jackson. Why the American pop icon? According to Maqoma:
“When I saw Michael Jackson, I was like: Wow here is somebody who is black and I can identify with that person because they’re able to break all kinds of stereotypes that I grew up knowing about being black.” https://vuyani.co.za/our-journey/
According to the artists in the well-attended talkback led by TITAS´ Charles Santos and production manager Siyandiswa Dokoda as well as two dancers, it was said that Maqoma (not in attendance due to another commitment) considers the dancers in the room when creating choreography.
“I wanted to create a space for artists to come together, for artist to develop so that they can be part of the complexity and start to define it one or another, but through the body. So Vuyani Dance Theatre was created as a space for us to come together to play, to find something more significant about ourselves, about our country and significantly to say who we are in the context of an urban setting.”
One audience member asked if there was improvisation during the performance and the answer was no. While improvisation plays a part in the company’s early compositional processes, once the piece is set, there is no variation of movements. The dancers move in complex fixed patterns. However, a notable comment by founding company member Roseline Wilkens was that while the movements are set, the feeling or the spirit that each dancer injects into a given performance can vary. She gave the example of how the piece changed for her after burying her husband and father of her young child. It became a deeply personal as well as an artistic journey, not only about grieving but about finding ways of thriving in spite of it.
Says Maqoma: “…I make work from a spiritual context. Once I’m invested in the work and I’m in the performance mode, I know for sure there is a spirit that is present. I’m very aware of it.”
The musical aspect related to Ravel´s Boléro, a familiar composition built from a single theme which grows through harmonic and instrumental variations, fits perfectly with the cultural theme of the Vuyani piece, which is singularly related to the momentum of emotional loss and grieving. It is of interest to note that Ravel created this composition as a ballet for his friend, Russian dancer and actress Ida Rubinstein (1885-1960). Thus, Vuyani’s adaptation fits into the composer’s initial sense of the work as a dance piece.
While the composition of Boléro revolves around variations on a theme, there is a pervasive snare-drum that rumbles through the entire 15-minute work. With few actual instruments besides a small snare drum, maracas, clapping, a vocal device that looked like a megaphone, stomping on the ground and an astounding variety of a cappella sounds and singing, there are no other instruments in the South African version. Included in the soundscape were the clicking sounds of the Zulu and Xhosa peoples.
Without a doubt the remarkable singers/musicians of the chorus organically blend with the movements of the dancers, sometimes provoking, piercing, or caressing, but always driving the movements and infusing the bodies of the dancers with their magnetic energy. There is a symbiotic relationship between dancers and singers both rhythmically and melodically. The musicians are Simphiwe Bonongo (Beatboxes), Xolisile Bongwana, Sbusiso Shozi, and Thabang Mkhwanazi, and the Dallas audience recognized them with resounding enthusiasm during the final ovation.
The choreography of Vuyani’s piece as performed in Dallas runs approximately 70 minutes of grueling physical virtuosity and deep emotional engagement by the dancers and vocalists. The dancers in the program were: Otto Andile Nhlapo, Roseline Wilkens, Katieho Lekhula, Itumeleng Tsoeu, Nathan Botha, Knok Moeketsi, Tshepo Molusi, Monicca Magoro, Simphiwe Nkosi, and Thabang Mdialose.
Thus, while Ravel’s fifteen-minute Boléro gives birth to the first and last of the Vuyani piece, the central body of the music riffs towards musical director/composer Nhlanhia Mahiangu’s own creative impulses. During the talkback, the company artists affirmed that the majority of the content of various chants and accompaniments by the four-person choir is original. (In-performance sound design was by Ntuthko Mbuyazi.)
The set design by Oliver Hauser concentrates on a minimalist aesthetic with a strong lighting component. Other than the ever-present crosses, a tall rock-like backdrop of flat columns descends at one point, changing from yellowish to bluish lighting. The lighting design by Mannie Manin used side and top lights in conical patterns, and there was an ever-present fog that suggested a dream-like state. Costumes by Black Coffee remained constant throughout the entire performance until the end tap-dancing scene, when there was a costume change to black gauzy draping from head to toe, and black hats—possibly a tribute to Michael Jackson.
It’s notable that the name Vuyani in the Xhosa language means “joy.” Xhosa and Zulu are considered related languages but not identical. Indeed, there was a sense of both mourning and joy in this unique performance piece, one which, while quite specific to South African culture, can be felt and understood universally. It seems fitting if not somewhat playfully ironic that the appropriation of a white, Western European musical landmark such as Ravel’s Boléro is turned on its head and seamlessly Africanized by a proudly Black dance theatre company in the most artful and self-affirming of ways.
Teresa Marrero is Professor of Latin American and Latiné Theater in the Department of Spanish at the University of North Texas. She is a theater & dance critic, and a fiction writer who enjoys navigating outside of her own cultural comfort zone.
WEB: For upcoming TITAS events, go to: titas.org
