The FNB Vita Dance Umbrella
by Robyn Sassen
For a number of years, performance art has been about serious provocative manoeuvres and broad agendas, levels of endurance and European literary theory. With acknowledgement to German Expressionism and Dada, as well as contemporary social and political theory, it has, by and large, been heavy and bleak.
Performance-trained practitioners Gerard Bester, Athena Mazarakis and Craig Morris are doing something completely different, not that different from performance art. In extrapolating on the evolution of love, Attachments - a duet in six parts which featured at this year's Dance Umbrella and again in the Dance Factory's Autumn Season during April - bears testimony to the presence of beauty and humour in art.
As opposed to Steven Cohen or Robyn Orlin's in-your-face confrontational work, Attachments is a sophisticated, subtle expression of beauty, not only in its levity, focus and conciseness, but also in its ability to confront head-on the dialectics of contemporary art theory.
Physical theatre was formally mooted as a performance specialisation by Gary Gordon in 1992, as Head of Drama at Rhodes University. The notion 'physical theatre', however, should be understood as an umbrella term, which serves as a professional term for a dance or art form.
We have seen it in many guises, from the work of Andrew Buckland and Lionel Newton, to the movement indicated in plays like Percy Mtwa's Woza Albert or Sibikwa's The Barbershop, for instance, where a large part of tone, content and narrative is dependent on the performers' ability to move in particular ways. By the same token, it is also present in works by practitioners like Cohen, Elu, PJ Sabbagha, Jay Pather and Orlin.
Generally, physical theatre is a medium of movement engineered to render dance more accessible. The idioms in traditional dance culture are often not conducive to readable narrative, which can compromise significant parts of a work. Physical theatre thus blends academic values with art-based and life-derivative ones, and teaches the performer and the audience awareness of body and gender dynamics.
Taking a break during the run of Attachments at the Dance Factory, Bester, Morris and Mazarakis spoke to ArtThrob of the difficulty of the language of dance. While it is important that it must not be blatantly accessible, dance's shortcomings in articulating narrative which is not clear is an historical problem. A medium like physical theatre has enabled the development of such an understanding.
As a performance medium, physical theatre is deliberately challenging in terms of what it is able to evoke. As specialist lecturer in movement in Wits' School of the Arts, Mazarakis has collaborated in several performance productions that blend cutting edge expression with clear yet idiosyncratic narrative. She believes in the grammar and vocabulary of movement as an essential component of physical theatre.
She acknowledges its subjectivity and also its mutability - it can take on various forms, from components in conventional theatrical productions to signature elements of dance pieces. 'Physical theatre expresses something pre-verbal that can allow you to escape a real-time use of language', she asserted. Morris who has a background in mime, corroborated this, commenting on how the language becomes expressible and accessible through the body.
The principles comprise the postmodern emphasis of the performer as co-creator and the collaborative, process-driven nature of the work. Mazarakis and Morris have been dancing together for 13 years.
In being nominally responsible for the work, but playing a collaborative role in its development, Bester commented on the presence of international dance culture on local dance platforms, within the last few years, as having given a sense of possibility to local practitioners.
Morris agreed: 'Physical theatre is about integrating performance values. It's about harmony and hermeticism and the merging of disparate elements ... [it] offers a performer the facility of being able to engage with, actively seek and enter an imaginary world. It is visceral.'
The three agree on the strength of Cohen's gestures in bringing violently controversial agendas into the dance arena for the first time in 1998 and subsequently. Cohen in essence has trained an art-aware dance audience and dance fraternity to understand the body as a vessel and a medium, and not just a means for dancing. Bester commented that the prescriptive maturity of the Dance Umbrella has subsequently been about its ability to negotiate dance's equivalent of 'But is it art?' on unjuried platforms.
Performances took place at both the Wits Downstairs Theatre and the Dance Factory in March and April.
