dancing emptiness

I've always been fascinated by Butoh. As a student I thrilled to those images of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, their bodies powdered and bent, chanelling the spirit of a dying flower, a breeze tremor or an ageing old woman grasping faded memories. I adored the scary nihilism of some of Sankai Juko's work. They struck a minor chord in me that I found hard to resist.

Part of its mystery I suppose, was that fact that it was so completely inaccessible -I mean, who would ever get a chance to meet a real live Butoh performer in little old Grahamstown? The best we could hope for was to read about it, in dog-eared art and dance journals in the university library. To scavenge for images on the internet. And make up what we thought it meant. For us. For me, it had the appeal of being so unlike any of the 'dance' stuff that my drama department was obsessed with. I mean, this was the home of the First Physical Theatre Company and its host of pretentious twats who loved throwing themselves at each other, at the floor, at the walls, and then sitting on the drama steps comparing bruises, slurping down energade and talking about the vocabulary of physical theatre and how pedestrian were those with fewer bruises. Ooooh, I loathed that weekly movement class. My and all five of my left feet. Me the uncoordinated lass who preferred to live in the airy but active space between her temples. Whose body always seemed a little left behind. (Yes, I often have to stop at streetcorners, sigh patiently, hurryup, catch up... my body a lagging reluctant child. Or is the body stopping waiting for the errant mind to wind her way back... ah, I've got better at this in recent years, but its a lifelong lesson.)

For me, Butoh had all the promise of an awkward poetry, of finding your own clumsy vocabulary, and delving into the dark recesses of unconscious mind. Emptying the body. Creating deep stillness, so that from there you may investigate the universe in all its strange forms and invite your body to converse with those forms in a silent way. Squelching into the grotesque, the 'darkness' within that Hijikata so honoured. Hollowing out the joints to create crevices in the body for mysterious essences to creep into.

Of course I never found it. Instead I had to drown in the deep end of progressions and extensions or gumboot baffling rhythms in my weekly torture sessions. I who never had the option of a ballet class in my grass walled bush classroom. Who somehow missed the clapping games that little girls get to play with each other. My hand eye coordination skills extended to turning the page of a book. Ah well.

So last weekend an extraordinary gift came my way. A visiting Butoh practitioner from the Su-En school in Sweden. A distilled performance on Friday night that defies words. She danced the dance of the ostrich. How can I describe it? A scrawny, lost being that is learning to walk. A dark earthsong, naked white and strangled on the floor. A slow contracted spiral, never graceful in the sense we may expect of 'dance' and yet utterly poetic.

I wasn't going to do the workshop. After three weeks away I thought it would be too thin an ice sheet to tread, relationship-wise. Imagine my suprise when he suggested it - but why not, it'll be good for you, might help with your writing. But, er - won't you - what about - I mean its the whole weekend! That's ok. Do it. Be good for you.

So I dragged my porridgy winterbottom to class on Saturday morning. A Movement Room, oh my body reacts instantly, expecting to hang out in the back row, sheepish clumsy, wheezing... except its on the 9th floor and there's a spectacular view of Jozi, mine dumps and jittery skyline.

But no, it certainly wasn't a picnic. Whatever my romantic projections about the art form, its still dance. The site of creation is in joints and muscles. To create that emptiness they speak of you have to retrain your body - gravity lines that hold you up but are cut at the hips, the knees. You walk on bended knees, low gravity, weight in the back of your body. and you walk. and you walk. and walk. and you sweat and dizziness fills where the tension fights with poisons fights with holding patterns in back, shoulders. wrenched ankle of weeks ago screams at you from the floor. calves hum, thighs sag and flab and mind doesn't want to play.

But then theres her still voice floating towards you. 'eyes are windows. the body is erased. eyes are erased. the body is small the world is big. the world is looking through the body the body doesn't see.'

Somehow, somehow, you find this in you. the cavities that crowd with daily nonsense do empty out. the mind does quieten. the eyes do become windows. and thirty seconds of this an hour is well worth it. somehow.

I did a slow walk once. twice, actually. With James (who was also there for the workshop). And Leonard, the good doctor. We walked down High Street during the swarming heaving bustle of the 2006 National Arts Festival. This usually takes about 7 minutes, if you stroll from Drostdy Arch to the Cathedral. It took us 3 hours. Slowing your blood to the pace of a tired snail. Teaching your bones to unfold as your consciousness swims, flails, then opens up to a karoo-like vastness. And the world is still there and people say such curious things. You see the pavement as you have never seen it, its maplike scrawls, its skinlike pores. You love the pavement, as it swims up to meet you and then you are not anymore. you are the pavement, past the pavement. the breath of the person next to you, tuned to your rhythm. something as transient as a cigarette smoke curl can take an eternity to infuse your nostrils, dissolve, go back to air as you step into, through and past it. And soon this feels like the normal, the required pace of existence. You cannot comprehend why the world around you is tearing at time in this frantic grasping way. And then you don't comprehend, or need to. You just exhale. And then it hurts and your blood clogs and your hands are heavy and you can't do it for a minute longer. and then you do. and the pavement, again. and the soft noise of everyone's busyness.

So we did one of these walks on Sunday, all 20 odd of us in the workshop, in line not looking down or up just sensing the change in pace and keeping same distance between us and walking backward and knowing when. and hurting, the muscles fighting, thighs cross and ankle belligerent, cursing. To the confusion of passers by on the wits campus, who probably, as they did at rhodes, just muttered to themselves "oh, drama students" as the catch all explanation.

Oh there was more - pain and delight both. I loved the faces - the wicked child (curved closed smile, tip of tongue points out, eyes look up and cross over....ha. made you do it.) I loved the 'conditions' that you learn - investigations into the state of isness of, for example, an onion segment, always in the process of becoming. My body fought me almost every step of the way. But I take away that voice of hers. 'eyes are windows. body is erased'.

I don't think I'll ever be a butoh dancer, not for audience. But i do like that i had the chance to empty this seething brain for a few brief expansive glimmers. And really, you should try that walk sometime. Its quite a thing.

the roar of blood in the head

I should have enjoyed it while i could. The silence in the skull. Soon after that post it developed into a chatter and then a steady clamour and hasn't really quieted down since.

Many reasons:
The Malawi trip.
I leave on Sunday for 21 days in Malawi, traveling around with the UN to write about their work there. My mind is clattering with the falling clutter of old images. Like when you take a long neglected box from a top shelf and all the shit up there comes down with it and lands on your head. I unconsciously packed my bag full of skirts! Why because when I was at school in the late '80's in Blantyre, it was the tail end of the reign of Kamuzu Hastings Banda and girls had to wear skirts below the knee, no trousers and be pictures of modesty and decorum. Which of course we were - gin swigging, Life cigarette smoking bright young things.

I haven't spent much time in Malawi since the days of my blue skirt and a head full of learning. There was a research trip in 1998, when I was doing my Masters. And a Lake House trip in 2000. I'm swarming with pictures unburying themselves. Even Facebook doesn't haul out this much old garbage.
The walk from school to town on a dusty Saturday morning. The shortcut, past the Anglican church and the graveyard full of longdead mzungus. Picking green guavas from the trees along the way.
Dreary weekends in Lilongwe after I had been kicked out of school. Walking to the American library and sucking up hours worth of reading on the Russian Revolution.
Always walking. Always dusty shoes and being offered lifts by dodgy men.
The inexhaustable hospitality of my extended foster family, the Osmans (another post another time) and samoosas with green tomato chutney.

The Fight
I'm sure it's the same in all relationships. There's one Big Issue that strikes like tinder, triggering old hurts for both of you. Some primal wound that you have that he or she has the opposite of, and they spoon together like razor wire. Playwrights understand this. How we all have one or two fundamental needs, and we're not necessarily attracted to the someone who can fulfil the need as we want it to be filled (I believe we can only really do this ourselves) but someone who will help you to heal the wound. And sometimes the bone has to be rebroken to be set again.

You know - you crave approval, s/he doesn't give it to you in the exact form you require.
All you want is belonging - the group, being a part of it. All s/he wants is solitude, individuality.

With us, the Fight is always about Going Away - childhood abandonment injuries dovetail neatly with the Sagittarian flight response. Ooh, its a pretty festival of love and leaving I tell you. Reminds me of that song "Everytime you go away, you take a piece of me[at] with you". But this time I think we've cracked it. This time i think I get what its about for me and interestingly its all to do with boarding school - the weirdness of Leaving vs Being Left and how going away to school is both, and how a child doesn't get that and knots it all up in her head - who is really doing the leaving here? And why do we fight with the people we love at airports? So perhaps this trip to Malawi represents more than just a nicely paid gig. Perhaps an old dragon can be put to rest. Perhaps I'll do it in trousers. Damn. I gave my chitenge away in the refugee bundles.

The Party
Before I go, dear friend Dion is leaving for Nwarlins to take up a teaching post at Tulane. I am so happy for him but as more and more of my friends leave for distant parts of the globe I feel like the Prestik Girl - pieces of me are being pulled and stretched and warped. One string stretching all the way to Sweden, another wrapped around Arusha, a long arm with globule attached to the tiny island of Lamu. A couple of tentacles lashed to London.
So we're throwing him a party tonight. Cajun blackened chicken and gumbo and hurricanes. There might just be some hefty drinking.

The Play
Its almost finished. And the closer I get to saving it as Final Draft, the louder the voices get. "Oh come on, you're not ending it like that are you". "I don't think he Would Do That". "Is that character really well rounded enough?" "Isn't it too wordy"
etc etc etc.
And then last night I went to see Ten Bush, at the Market theatre. Witchcraft, ancestral curses, beautiful staging a la theatre de complicite. I was totally drawn in, and it made me shiver. It also just confirmed for me some of the choices I've made (I also dip into worlds of dreams, curses, deadpeople still alive, events that repeat themselves, strange things that spring from strange wombs). It reminded me why I'm drawn to the ritual aspects of theatre. That extraordinary ability that a certain kind of theatre has, to transmute reality. All the trans words, actually. Transform, transubstantiate, translate, transfigure, transgress, transpire and entrance.

Well done to Mncendisi Shabangu and Craig Higginson. This has helped to negotiate with the roar in my head. Now onto the serious business of how to make a hurricane. This is also an important magical ritual you understand - we have to protect D from the very real threat of future Katrinas, Ivans and whatever they will call the ones to come - George, maybe. Or Laura.

Your name on a grain of rice

A post or two back I wrote about the Grahamstown Festival. I kind of cut that post in half because it started to expand into a long retrospective of all the Grahamstown festivals I have ever attended. Since I'm not there and its much on my mind, I want to dwell on this. At the risk of inflicting a long read on you. Miranda said, 'it'll be just the same next year.' Not true. Each festival is subtly different, with its own unique pulse. A different buzz, scandal or theme each year, and I'm always amused by how people attempt to define it before its run is done. "its a strange festival this year isn't it?" or "its kind of flat this year, don't you think?".

True the stock standard fare is much of a muchness. The 'write your name on a grain of rice' man will be there year after year. As will the ubiquitous mats woven from plastic bags and an oversupply of crocheted rasta hats.

But even the 'this year will be my last' naysayers come back year after year, like oysters that just can't help opening when the moon is full.

1992. My first festival. I am a second year drama student and me and the only other girl who isn't keen on being a physical theatre dance slut, Stacy Hardy, have been brewing a play. To be accurate: we have co-written an hour long piece that is set in a mortuary, starring the undertaker and his crew of goodlooking girls that he has kidnapped and is trying to brainwash for his nefarious ends. Its called Cold Storage. Its embarrassing. No more on that. Those of you (you know who you are) who remember any lines (especially that line...)shhhhh. But hey, my first festival, my first play (unless you count the pantomime at Chinzombo when I was 10) my first naked stage appearance... life was great. And the start of a great collaboration with Ms Hardy. Our company is called Venus Fly Trapeze.

1993. Stacy writes, I perform. God and Fetish Engineering, I think it was. I can remember very little of this, except that two of our performers (yes, you know who you are) were having a very active festival at the power station by night and I would hate to know what colours and shapes they saw in the audience that one performance.

1994: I think this was the year I cameo-ed in a couple of plays and forgot to write down one of the show times and simply didn't pitch. oops. ah well. But the festival itself was marked by the headiness of 94 in general. South Africa's colourful rainbow labour pains.

1995: Stacy and I do a double bill. Mine is called Dante and Velvet. Its a love story. Hers is called Nightshade Pornography, and its not anything to do with pornography. By now Venus Fly Trapeze has a flicker of a reputation - you may get nudity. And bad language. But Stacy's piece is all poetic post-feminism and live angle-grinding on stage. Hers was on first. The drunk east cape men expecting a bit of salaciousness got an angle grinder instead. They got mad and walked out. Ours played to a handful of family and friends.

1996: One week before the festival, late at night in the wardrobe making costumes, Stacy and I look at each other nervously, thinking the same thought. Why is everything going so well? We're doing the flagship student production, representing our department on the Student Programme. A beautiful script by Stacy about Rimbaud and Verlaine, stuck on a train... the rain rains, they lose the plot, the dialogue, the knife... Its not the Fringe Program, so we have a real budget for the set and I'm designing and have created a dreamy platform on wheels with a huge perspex sheet of glass, scrawled with lines of dialogue from the script and we've got a little pump that makes real water trickle down the glass on the outside, and of course at the magical moment... it turns to blood.

And its all going so well. And then this terrible, crushing news. Dear Lindy the design supervisor, lecturer, muse and goddess, loses her gorgeous 4-year old son to meningitus. Everything loses its colour overnight. We tell Lindy its ok, go home we'll pick up the pieces. Suddenly we are not designing one show are designing about five. And it all feels horribly frivolous and what-on-earth-for.

1997: Is this the year that Mr Fell gets Dion and me to play husband and wife in that strange little play Planet Machine? Where no-one is acting, we are all for real emoting. Still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Is this the year Dion and I decide that, well, sex sells and so we do a programme of erotica called Bedtime Stories, fully clothed and tastefull. Actually it does rather well, but the problem is we also have this other show, Next Stop Ultra Ubuntu. Ahem. We co-write with my partner Bernd. Lets just say that the successful show paid for this one.

1998: I have no money. I am a post grad student. I can't afford to go to any shows. I decide to read Anna Karenina instead and go to art exhibitions. I skulk around book fairs reading Dambudzo Marechera in between the Tolstoy. I go to the Word fest and read a couple of my short stories to a small gathering of writers. I feel diffident, whatever that means, thats what I feel. I'm a waitress at Die Geel Kaffe. Their cheesecake is the best in town and I get to speak my mind to a very drunk customer coz we have no bloody marys.

1999: Are you mad? How can I possibly perform at the festival. I am the design supervisor, the job Lindy used to have. I am feeding, nurturing scores of students who have their own plays going. And staff members. I put out fires, stitch up hems, delegate scene painting and keep track of students trying to steal the best costumes. The design studio is an alchemists cave of bubbling pots of dye, whirring sewing machines and the high stink of contact glue on polystyrene.

2000. I am not at the Grahamstown festival. I have left Grahamstown after 7 years. I am in Livingstone trying to make the Livingstone festival work.

2001: I am officially employed by the festival. I am ROCCO. ROCCO stands for Radio Operations Communications Control Officer. Rocco is the person who sits in the cold office near stores and directs traffic, sending equipment to all the festival venues via a 5-ton truck, a 10-ton truck, and one runner in a bakkie (a bakkie is a pickup truck for those of who don't know). Every year we swear we will use scooters next year, as traffic is a joke in this sleepy town which swells beyond capacity once a year. The area around the cathedral is swarming with traders and and really the village that pretends its a city becomes one big parking lot.
But I love being Rocco. This is me in my element - putting out fires, preventing train smashes, multi-tasking like an octopus, in short - telling other people what to do, at rapid fire rate.
"Please send 2 janus cables and a fresnel to Princess Alice Hall."
"Blackout crew - you need to get to City Hall before their 2 oclock show, the blackout [black stuff you put on windows to make it dark] has fallen off the top window."
"Cleaning crew - you need to get to Rhodes theatre ASAP please and clean up the stage. They used flour in the last production. Make sure you have plenty of mops."
"Lighting team, lighting team, come in for Rocco. The dimmer rack at Nombulelo hall is playing up. Again.Please get there asap, their show goes on in half an hour"
"Sound, sound team you need to take the cd player at the Masonic lodge and swop it out with the one at Vickys."
"Herbie, Herbie, how are you doing sourcing those 2 sheep hearts for Graeme College? Yael Farber needs 2 sheep hearts for her show. Please tell the butcher we will need two a day. That's two a day until the end of festival. Thanks."
Oh I love it. I don't have the stats to hand, but its truly amazing how many kilometres of cable get used, and how they get by on the minimum amount of equipment, moving amps from venue to venue to fit in with back to back scheduling.
And of course the ladders. The most common request to Rocco from the often young, inexperienced venue managers is for ladders. And Rocco has to keep track of the ladders, see, so they all have names.
"Rocco Rocco. Its the Drill Hall"
"Stand by I'm sorting out another crisis" (Rocco is often on two phones as well as the radio and the intercom to stores)
"Rocco Rocco"
"I said stand by!"
"But we need a ladder, its urgent, a lighting bar has come down!"[what? how on earth did they manage that?]
"All venues, all venues, please tell Rocco which ladders you have"
"Rocco its Princess Alice we have Hettie but we're doing a turn-around we need her."
"Rocco its the Great Hall we have Doris but we're in a focusing session."
" All venues...?"
Silence.
Silence.
Silence. They keep stum about their ladders.
"Black out crew this is Rocco please go past the Drill Hall and lend them your ladder for half an hour."

2003: I'm Rocco again, and this time I have a show on as well, crafted with my old mucker Stacy Hardy. She wrote it, I'm performing. Its called "Terror is not the erotic commodity it used to be." I do the early Rocco shift, get off at 5, sleep for an hour, take handfuls of vitamens and arrive for evening performance, flat out for 10 days. One can only do this once a year.

2004: I'm in Joburg in a job I loathe. I can't go to the festival. Miserable.

2006: I'm Rocco again!! And starting to have a serious identity crisis. Am I an actor? a performer? A tekkie? A playwright? A writer? Somebdy help! Stacy, where are you when I need you? Let's make a play! But we live in different cities now, and have different priorities. I don't know who I am. Have been travelling through Zambia going to ceremonies and immersing myself in festivals that are a far, far cry from this. Festivals with one performance venue, and its in the open, and people stand in one circle, and everybody knows the song.

2007: I'm writing the book about the festivals of Zambia. in Joburg.

2008: I'm sitting with 2000 copies of this book, scratching my head in the hope that I'll become a marketing genius overnight. And dear Stacy has a play on the main festival. She is writing and performing for a piece called Untitled, directed by this year's Standard Bank Young Artist award winner, Jaco Bouwer. And this is the real reason I feel I want to be there now. Stacy. All grown up and on the main programme.

So cheers, Ms Hardy. I hope the show comes to Joburg.
Perhaps next year, the Rocco cabaret that I always planned.
Perhaps next year, this play I'm busy wrestling right now.
Perhaps next year I'll actually get my name engraved on that grain of rice.