Every arts writer has an Achilles heel, and mine is dance. I can sing the right tune with musicians. In the fine arts, I’ve learnt to tell a lithograph from an etching. Conceptual art? I can play in that playground. Theatre? Right up my alley. Literary arts? I’ve got degrees aplenty. Digital arts? Like most, I’m digitally capable as a consumer, even if I don’t get the nuances of design and engineering and coding.
But dance — well, dance exposes my ignorance. The technicalities, the history, the vocabulary, all these have remained beyond my grasp. Contemporary dance is a hybrid form, incorporating various “traditional” dance disciplines but also morphing with performance art, live installation, physical theatre and more. It can be befuddling. It can be bathetic. It can also be brave, brain-bending and astonishingly beautiful.
It is paradoxical that the aesthetic appeal of dance is best captured in photography. Dance, after all, implies movement rather than stasis. But perhaps — especially for those of us still trying to get to grips with the form — still images are effective because they convey a moment, a mood or a fragment of meaning in a dance piece without the viewer feeling compelled to make sense of the whole. This is dance as tableau, as visual art, with the theatricality and the visceral experience of live performance implied or teasingly suspended.
These were my reflections on viewing specialist dance photographer Val Adamson’s online exhibition Through the Lens, which is presented as a “photographic conversation” between Adamson and Jay Pather. Pather’s work as choreographer, director and dance dramaturge is being celebrated at the 2021 JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience. He is this year’s Legacy Artist at the annual dance platform run by the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
I was able to test my theory about dance photography against a very different record of Pather’s artistic accomplishments over the past two decades when the festival was launched earlier this week with a screening of Undertow. This compilation of video material selected from the repertoire of Pather’s Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre took viewers from the streets of Barcelona and Mumbai to forgotten rooms in the Cape Town City Hall — an enriching tour of site-specific interventions as well as staged works, ranging from pop-up provocations to the almost epic scope of pieces such as Qapela! Caesar and Body of Evidence.
Watching these clips, I imagined myself in the position of passers-by or formal audience members who had the privilege of watching these pieces live. In some instances they, too, were on screen: delighted, confused, awkward, indifferent. I have occupied similar positions myself many times. I’m willing to admit that it may be an effect brought about by being deprived of live performance and interactive art for the better part of two years, but I wanted to shake those people (and my former self) by the shoulders and say, “Don’t you realise how lucky you are?”
Actually, if I could speak across time, my advice would be kinder. “Lean into it,” I would say to them and to myself; “lean into everything in this dance work that is lovely and ugly, funny and disturbing, poignant and perplexing.”
Or I might just quote from JOMBA! founder and artistic director Lliane Loots, whose eloquent words to the virtual audience on opening night provided both a manifesto for dancers and a vindication of dance. Loots spoke about bodies, breath and border crossings, emphasising dance as a “necessary space” for exploring a “civil, health and cultural crisis of ill-fated borders erected, broken down, reconstituted (sometimes very violently) and sometimes rebuilt anew”. She honoured cultural workers and especially dancers who “open critical dialogue and, most significantly, remind us — because sometimes in a crisis we forget this — that all revolutions need beauty”.
Energised by this insight, I will be enjoying the rest of JOMBA! 2021 with an eye on the beautiful and the true. The festival boasts an impressive programme, remaining focused on the local (six Durban-based choreographers are premiering new work, and there are numerous platforms for SA artists) without becoming parochial: the international participants are curated under African Crossings, Indian Crossings and European and American Crossings.
• The 23rd JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience is online from August 24 to September 5 at https://jomba.ukzn.ac.za/
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