The annual dance umbrella has just come to an end.  As the scaffolding was being folded and the dancers returned to their respective studios to await another season, it seems the South African dance industry will continue to face unchanging challenges.

Though this year’s programme boasts an increase in the number of female dancers’ and choreographers’ works, the festival continues to battle with a historic need to transform itself, while also fighting to define its relevance in an ever changing art world. It’s a new terrain marked by works that pays little respect to antiquated notion of genre and discipline exclusivity. The use of body and a site to of artistic meaning making and symbol activity has since been co-opted by the visual arts as performance while a ballet also retains some of its old world uses. The need for dance to justify its continued existence as an independent creative field is ever more urgent.

This could not have been more evident than in the festival’s opening work at the dance factory in the Newtown cultural precinct. It was titled On Fire: The Invention of Tradition. The new piece choreographed by Constanza Macras deals with, as the catalogue stated, “the re-evaluation of heritage and tradition, in relation to segregated cultural groups, being articulated in new ways in urban life with self-defined practices and rituals.”

The works sees a troop of dancers made up of South Africans, including the 2014 Standard Bank Young artist of the Year, Fana Tshabalala and Berlin based performers in collaboration with visual artist, Ayana V. Jackson. Originally from the US, though now based in Joburg, Jackson’s photographic work interrogates the representation of the “Other” in historical and journalistic photography.

Her images comprise a kind of performative posing that restates the gestures and postures of photographed black bodies during colonial times. These are incorporated into the performance by dancers punctuating their routine by taking moment to mimic Jackson’s images as they are projected onto a white screen hung at the back of the stage.

The work’s focus on re-evaluating historic assumptions, along with facing up to challenges faced by established traditions as their custodians confront dilemmas of posed by a changing world. All these are symbolic to the state of the dance industry in South Africa. It’s a sentiment noted by the festival boss Georgina Thompson in hr opening address at the show in a remark that underscore the lopsided structure of race, power and opportunities in South African dance.

 

Percy Mabunda

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