Reza

Everyone will have their stories of her. Everyone who knew her, worked with her or was taught by her will have some little anecdote or snapshot that they will tell in tribute of her. Students discussed her endlessly, trying to pin down what she was really. People wanted to get a handle on her. They wanted words. Like Eccentric. Ethereal. Touched. Brilliant. Alchemist. Sorcerer.

For me the word that has been chiming in my head all day is lucent. She was just… lucent.

We all have our stories. These are mine.

1992: First year. End of year drama exam. I have not studied, I cannot remember much of the blur of theatre history lectures. But one of the questions is on Noh theatre, and the essay I write comes out whole, intact, as I recall her lectures on Noh. She embodied the form, breathed the detail into us, so vivid, so enraptured. I remember every precise moment.

1993. Second year. My first acting class. The moment has arrived. Class with the fabled Reza de Wet. Nervous but oh so cool students cluster on the Rhodes Theatre stage. She is  -  shell like, those Noh gestures that we’d later understand as trademark, the fragility that we’d later realise was robustness. The transparent skin. The wicked laugh. She’s telling us to listen, and to hear the mouse. There’s a mouse, she says…can you hear it? Shuffling and giggles, and then the silence as some of us get it and yes – I can hear the mouse, scratching under the floorboards. Yes, there it is, your mouse is over there, and it’s a shy mouse, or a frenetic mouse…she’s telling each person when they have heard the mouse and what kind of mouse it is.

That same lesson, the first one. 'Now stand… here on the stage. Stand…and look up at your feet. Stand….and look up at your feet.' In that one magical marvellous moment, the world swings around, and I am, I am looking up at my feet. My head is down, I am clinging on to the planet with my toes, thoughts and hair and gravity streaming out of my head, and holding on by the grace of who knows what… and then a raucous laugh as she sees it happening, and it dissolves. I am upright again.

Something deep inside me clunks into place like the sound of a safe door finding its combination lock groove. I am here, I am in the right place. Thank God I ended up studying here.

That was second year. The year she berated me for shaving off my hair. Your hair is your antenna, she tells me crossly.

1994. Third year.

While the whole country is shifting around us, the first democratic elections are being held, those wonderful photographs being taken of queues snaking outside voting stations and breaths being held about whether or not we’ll make it over the transition, I am not in South Africa. Well I am, but only in body. For the rest, I am in the Russian countryside somewhere. Outside, a cherry orchard is being threatened and I am ‘whining about going to Moscow’ as Richard E Grant memorably puts it in Withnail and I. Varya. And the joyful delight that Reza gets when we actually manage to give Yepikhodov a pair of squeaky shoes. In retrospect, I am not learning about acting, as my third year self would believe. I am learning about writing. For Reza, Chekhov was more than a muse, he was a regular visitor and adviser. But I am not learning from Chekhov. I am learning from her.

And she suggests I do an Ophelia for my 3^rd year end of year piece. Together we explore a multiple-personality, nervous, crass, eager-to-please Ophelia. Too interpretive, too conceptual, it bombs. But I know she fought in my corner with the external examiner.

1997-98.

When Reza was supervisor for my MA our visits were not frequent. They didn’t need to be. They were potent instead. I’m not sure that she really approved of the directions my meandering research was taking me, too political for her sensibilities, I’m sure. She’d have wanted me to delve into the mysteries of the mask work I was researching (the gule wa mkulu masquerades), and I couldn’t, I had to talk about representation and identity and outsider ethnographies. But when we sat together in the office of the Anthropology department and that Professor was grilling me about why this should fall under a drama research enquiry instead of an anthropological one, she fought in my corner fiercely. Or would that be flirted? She endured the brutal espresso he prepared for us, gasping weakly for a little milk.

I will remember her in the latticed shadow of that room in her house where she saw visitors, afternoon light striking her sideways, she might have been a collection of dust-mites, she seemed to be dematerialising in the East Cape light. But also not. Also, more present than most people are capable of. She told me about a plant that she had been sitting next to for many consecutive afternoons that summer. How this plant finally, one evening, gave itself up to her, and emanated its essence to her, just released its …essence for her. Except she put it better than that.

We who liked to think we knew her thought we could see past the ethereal, chaotic, discombobulated exterior she projected, we liked to say things like, oh but that’s just for show, she’s really very grounded, its part of her mask, actually she’s really very organised. And things like that. But of course she was much better at escaping definition than any of us were at pinning one on her.

When the visiting psychic came and we were only allowed one question each, and we sat, bristling with questions in the theatre auditorium, her one question was, “what is it I need to know?” Sensible to the core, where it mattered.

She was all the stories and myths that we spun around her. And she was none of them. I recently read of Oscar Wilde that he said “What is true about a man’s life is not what he does, but the legend he creates around himself… You must never destroy legends; it is through them we’re given a glimpse of the real face of a man.” I think she got this on a fundamental level. But it was instinctive, never contrived.

1999

Now we are colleagues, we work in the same department and fights brew and simmer about workloads and contact hours. I remember one, in particular. Not the content, just the feeling, the hot explosive feeling of a small, intimate, family vibe staff meeting where things have been left unsaid for so long and emotions simmer under the surface. And her shock, her incomprehension that these are spilling over. Of course an empty office with her name on it is more important than workloads. Of course it doesn’t matter that she hardly teaches anymore and takes mysterious time off to write plays. I get it now that my youthful arrogance has simmered away.  I also know now what that’s like, trying to juggle the student load and the desperate need to fence off the headspace for writing. It must have been an enormous strain.

In the design studio, sometime in 1999, she is cranking up the wheezy old computer that we both had access to for email. After my grandfather died I dreamed about elephants almost every night for a year. I theorise endlessly to anyone who will listen. What does it mean? What do they want? She fixes that eye on me and says, “They want you to write about them”.

And when I did, when there was a production of one of my wobbly first plays, she came to me after opening night, and asked me, laughing “Well how does it feel?” There was so much in that laugh and that question. The generosity of asking it, the understanding, the knowledge that it’s a weird, mixed up bemused feeling at best. The way she had of never actually giving feedback yet somehow imbuing you with the eye to be your own best critic.

Because today, this morning, from about 9.00am, I was hot and bothered and flustered and angry. My son was having a bad day and clingy and needy. Yesterday I discovered a script, 15 pages fragment of something I thought I had lost in the first laptop heist. A draft, a fragment, but something that is worth spending some time on. And I am berating myself, in the car, for the time lost. It’s been 16 years, I say to myself, 16 years since I graduated from honours, and where is the work? Where are the plays, the novels, the stories I was supposed to have put out there by now? And I know that it’s all about the way mundanity seeps through the cracks. Domestic creep. Choosing this over that. Grocery shopping over an hour at the desk. TV over reading. I think of Reza, and understand the fierceness that you need to protect that time. That to be a writer you need to be soft and open and whimsical, but also growling and tough and uncompromising.

And then, an hour later I hear this news. That this great mind, this lucent, embodied soul has hatched into her next phase of being. And I feel so so lucky to have had the time I did. I knew she was sick (only three months ago, it happened so quickly) but I imagined her fighting it with that quirky vitality, that cloudy luminescence.

Another random memory – 2003. I’ve not lived in Grahamstown for over a decade. It’s the end of festival, my show is done, its late at night, I’m partying at Guy’s house. Earlier that day I bought two copper snake bracelets from a hippie near the bowling club. The kind you wear high up on your arm. A healing snake. A random impulse grabs me. I head out into the cold and up the familiar road to Reza’s house, a walk I can do in my sleep coz I used to live next door to her, and –actually I run, it feels like one of those moments when the spirit grips you and you have to obey. I’m not really on popping in terms with the de Wet Reardons any more – its been ages. But there they are, awake, and talking through the festival fare that they have watched – what has been most nourishing, what’s bland and soulless. I’m breathless in the doorway, and I hand her the copper snake – “I bought this today, I didn’t know why I needed two, but here, it’s for you. It’s definitely for you.” And she graciously invited me in for a midnight cup of tea.

I will remember her smile.

I will remember those hazel-hectic eyes, one searching within, one without.

I will remember her cranky blue Mazda which she famously drove in first gear and could never reverse.

I will remember the way she tasted the words as she inhaled before speaking.

I will remember her multi-coloured coat.

I will remember the last time I saw her, at the Drostdy Arch after a Butoh performance, a couple of days before her second grandchild was born. She had that deep soul-satisfied look that she got after seeing a performance that filled her up, as if the air around her had suddenly become delicious.

And from yesterday’s Facebook tributes, these are some things that others remember:

“I'll never forget Reza stopping me on the stairs in the drama department one day. "Timothy you need to move toward light. Stay away from all this dark shit." It wasn't hollow advice and I did not miss in her sentiment a great deal of sincere concern for my soul. And that's how I saw Reza; A Sorceress deeply involved in the world on an ethereal level beyond my understanding.” –Tim Redpath

‎'See the art within yourself, not yourself within the art' - Reza de Wet. RIP. Thank you.

'She made her mark like a kaleidoscope' - Fernande Wybenga

And is it arrogant to ask, now that she is in the great cherry orchard in the sky, that she may pay us the occasional fleeting visit as Chekhov did with her?

Rhinos

Chibembe, sometime in the late 1970's
My first writing assignment, the first to give me a fair wobble of stress and publishing angst, was an essay about my day, or about something from my daily days. It was a school assignment, back in the days when my mother home-schooled us via correspondence course. We agreed that I would write about a game drive. That was a typical thing we did, game drives. I remember the drive in sharp detail - that riverine road between Chibembe and Nsefu lodges. Scratchy tawny plains in between. We saw seven rhinos that day, including two calves. I didn't want to write the story about our game drive. I had an uneasy feeling about doing something so important as setting pen to paper and making words and a story about something so mundane as a game drive, and one in which no leopards were to be seen. Just boring old rhino. I think I overcame the problem by dictating the story to my mother and she wrote it down. I was suspicious of authorship, even at six years old.

Mfuwe Lodge, South Luangwa, circa 1982.
Mom wakes us early to look at the two male rhinos fighting. Locked in a struggle, in the middle of the sloshy, muddy lagoon. They try to circle one another at the pace of glaciers melting. They make strange noises I haven't heard rhinos make before. Its a Sight. A Gargantuan Battle, says one of the grown ups. They are there so long we eventually get bored of looking and go back to throwing wild mangoes at the monkeys.

On the Baobab road, circa 1983
A rhino has been poached. In the National Park and everything, so brazen. Its horns have been hacked out of its skull. Really there is no better use for the word. Hacked. I peer into the cavity of the vulture-shit-streaked hull. Inside, there are maggots. Many swarming, teeming, writhing maggots. Phil Berry, proper in his khakhi knee-highs, counts the number of maggot species. More than 11 different kinds of maggots in that rhino's belly.

On the Chinzombo road, mid 1980's
Patrick was always up for a wrestle or a wrangle, whether with a Land Rover wheel or a black-necked spitting cobra. Preferably an encounter that involved some kind of injury. I don't know if these moments helped him to be more successful with women than he would have otherwise been, but the arm-in-a-sling look was big with him. Naturally he was delighted to hear that a rhino calf had been spotted on the Chinzombo road. Ropes and lassoing and loading it onto the back of the vehicle and maybe a somersault in the air off its back, rodeo style. I wonder what happened to that baby rhino. Perhaps it got to the Frankfurt Zoo.

The Breakfast Table, mid 1980's
They are starting a thing called Save the Rhino Trust. My grandfather is asking us kids for catchy slogans. They will be making T shirts. They will be going on patrol and stuff, to try to catch poachers, but they also need to do something called Creating Awareness. Spreading the Message. So that other people who don't have rhinos on their back doorstep will care about the rhinos getting poached. Chantal suggests "My Horn is My Dilemma". She has to explain it to me. Even at nine years old I know that this slogan is not going to cut it.

The Wildlife offices, circa 1986
My mom and dad and David and Judy and Derek and Bev Joubert are making a documentary together. Its all arty and stylish Peter Beardish, but its about hunting and wildlife and human's fascination with killing animals. They ask permission to photograph the skulls at the Wildlife Offices. Piles and piles pf elephant and rhino skulls, picked up On Patrol. There's a photo of me sitting on the step of that piled high room of skulls. My face is sad.

A half-term break, circa 1987
Debbie swears she sees a rhino in the half light, that gloaming time when were are driving fast to get home and not really game viewing anymore and the combretum bushes obscure everything on the side of the road. We reverse to look but no-one else sees anything. I, for one, think she must have been mistaken. You never see rhino here any more. It happened so quickly. Really, before anyone could really mobilize properly or come up with a decent slogan. That was in the South Luangwa National Park, where they no longer exist. In less than a decade. It is happening in South Africa right now as we speak. It really doesn't take long. I, for one, will really miss them. But no-one has time to care.

The easy part

Disclaimer: this is part three: very long and erm, laborious.


After the walk Xoli puts on her rubber gloves again and I try not to punch her lights out while she fiddles around in the heart of the storm. Eye of the storm is what they say though, isn’t it? Still not, she tells my sinking heart. Then, she’s frowning…Sorry…her fingers probe my depths and I want to cry. She looks at me. She’s released something. There was a clench. Or something. I just went from 0 to 3 in under a second. They give racing drivers medals for stuff like that.

The next hours are a blur. Images through smeared glass. Some vomiting, some walking. Some squatting. And then: you have only progressed one cm in three hours. The world flattens out when I hear this. It’s truly discouraging. Everything is through thick sheets of glass. Underwater.

These are your options, she is saying. We can wait, walk some more, keep active. Or break the membranes … put you on an oxytocin drip to speed up the contractions. I don’t want to do that but you may have to. Something about Dr Mia and the length of time you are “allowed” to labour before they want to intervene.

They call in Elizabeth, she’s a doula. Her touch is angelic. Hands on my sacrum. Feathery stroking of hair and shoulders. Ntombi is here now. Angel. Music, sitting on the ball. Light touch brings relief, endorphins. How do you feel, asks the gentle Elizabeth. I feel like I’m on drugs. Good, she says. Beautiful, these amazing women. Bernd is relieved too, I’m aware of his unclenching. Elizabeth says I’m holding it in my shoulders each time (Of course I’m fucking holding it in my shoulders). On the ball, leaning forward. Easy. Oh, this is good, can I stay here….

Problem.

This sitting business. On the ball, on the stool, leaning forward, the contractions ease off. It feels good. But, um…its not bringing the baby any bloody closer is it? I’ve got to walk again.

Bernd walks me with the patience and humour required to support a doddering geriatric. From the white wall to the hedge with yellow flowers. From the hedge with yellow flowers to the metal pole of the washing line. Step. Grind of bowlingball on pelvis. Step. Surge. Lean. Breathe. Or round the jungle gym outside, sunlight braai-ing my eyeballs. Walking around a jungle gym the size of a small bathroom feels like the Otter Trail.

Writing this now, looking at the notes I wrote a few days after, the writer in me is asking me to edit, cut, package, put in sub-headings. But the teacher in me wants you to feel it – how boring and protracted this birthing business can be.

When they check me again I’m about 5cm. We’re trying to get to ten, remember. And my waters still haven’t broken. But always, every time they check, the baby’s heartbeat steady as it was in all the weekly check-ups. Patient fellow. Another walk to Zoo Lake with the gentle Ntombi. Dimly aware of how this must appear – this strange slow animal presence, a woman squatting on the side of the road. I feel invisible though, like I’m in another dimension.

Back in the cool dark of the Genesis room (I’m hot, then cold, then thirsty then hungry then vomiting. And very very tired.) I squat. And suddenly there’s a gush. Waters breaking at last. But I’m still only five cm and only one layer of membranes has broken. Ntombi’s voice is serious now. We have to get these contractions to progress. She has to break the second layer. And the oxytocin drip. She’s worried I won’t have enough energy for the push. The push? What’s this push everyone keeps talking about? Oh yeah, I remember now. There’s a baby coming. I’m going to have to push a baby out of me.

She says to have a sleep. An afternoon nap, as it were. Bernd suggests the rainbow relaxation CD. Good idea. I sleep, dimly aware of the tickticktick of Bernd playing Quadrapop on his phone. When I wake I am determined, fresh, clear. I am going to walk around that jungle gym one more time, dammit.

Actually my sequence is totally out. I don’t know in what order this happened: sleeping, walking, Ntombi breaking the membranes, Bernd’s tense voice saying I must walk when all I can do is lie there and moo like a buffalo. Hushed voices around me. Deep in my sleep remembering Ntombi saying I must get my head in the right place for the next phase.

Yes, that’s it – that echoes in my sleep and when I wake I go walking, on my own this time. Get back to the room and the clouds part in my head. Of course. There’s a next phase. I have to do this. No one else can do this. The drip. I need the drip. Lets do it.

As she’s getting needles and tubes lined up I say, I’m scared. I have some fear.
Ok, she says. What is the fear?
That it will get too intense for me to handle.
The pain?
Yes, the pain. (yes, I will use the word. The Pain)
She tells me my Plan A pain relief is the bath: getting in the water helps.
Plan B – I can ask for Pethedine. But remember, you need to welcome the pain. You have to have the intense contractions, that’s what you need.
Ok. Ok. Lets do it.

I waddle to where Bernd is sitting outside. I’m going to do the drip, I say.
Good, he says. Everyone is concerned. I’m concerned.
Its ok, I say. Its going to be ok.

Ntombi tells me I am surfing very close to Dr Mia’s cut-off point. Or, his cut point, as it were. I don't want to be cut. Lets have tried everything, she said. I’m prepared to push it a little past that point because I know this is what you want.
Yes. This is what I want. And always, the baby’s heartbeat, so steady.

Within minutes of having the needle in the back of my hand the waves come thick and fast. Yes, its intense, but I realise that what was wrong before was that they were so irregular. Now each one lasts for exactly three breaths: the first is the gathering swell, the middle one is the peak, the third helps to ebb it away. Its just me and my breath now. No sightseeing on this heavy weather surf. Ntombi’s voice saying you need this pain its helping you. Welcome the pain. My voice, at some point, saying everyone switch off your phones. Now.

In no time, I get that need-to-poo feeling they spoke of. I want to push. And waiting for them to bustle around and fill the bath seems to take longer than the whole labour so far. I need to push Now guys, like really Now. Hurry the fuck up.

I don’t know how I got into the water but I’m here now. Candles. Cool. Yoga CD. id I ask for that? Oh look that’s weird, there’s Monica from the health store, what’s she doing here? Doula on duty. She has a night job. Hi Monica. Bernd and I touch fingertips, lock eyes. Here’s another one. In out in out in out. Done. And again.

Ok, work with the contractions, use all your energy to push as if you are going to do a poo. I hear Miranda’s voice in my head: chin into your chest and puuuuush. I breathe in and make a kind of grunty rattle sound. Ntombi says that one was in your throat. Push right down into your bum.

I’m getting it now. Three pushes per contraction and a tiny rest in between. Actually, no rest in between. Just enough time to refuel on oxygen before the next ten-footer comes bearing down on me. Bernd keeps shoving the straw in my dry mouth. I want to drink but need the air first. It takes about ten rounds before I manage to make the words: breathe first then drink.

Ntombi’s voice my anchor: “brilliant Tamara, you’re doing so well. Keep going.” The repetition bouys me along.

Change to a squat. Sometimes the wave knocks a sob out of me as it comes. Push push push, breathe, sip – and again.

Eventually a new feeling – stinging, burning. Baby’s coming says Xoli. Ntombi: Push past the ring of fire. Push past that burning ring. I know what she means but that burning ring doesn’t feel like it has a beyond. At some point I feel sure that I have done enough and can stop. Someone else must please finish up for me. I’ve done my best.

Xoli says, I can feel his head. Next time, put your fingers here and feel his head. I expect to feel more than the puny 50c coin size that I can feel. Am I only that far?

Now its serious business pushing. Ntombi’s voice, the music – the yoga CD. Long Time Sun. Ah well, so he won’t be born to that song…..

Push Tamara you're doing so well push past the burning ring you're doing so well baby’s coming.

I PUSH and I push and I push. Now I can really feel him coming. I’ve never worked so hard or wanted anything so so much. I push as if my life depends on it. My life does depend on it. So does his. Two lives. Lets go.

At some point, I know, this is it, its coming. When that round is finished, I gasp – oh no he’s gone back in!
Its ok, you’ve stretched, next time he’ll come further.
Its true. Next time he does.
And the time after that a tiny bit more.
And then many times when its just in one place. Then more.
And then they’re telling me to pant like a dog. And I do.
I push – the biggest one, like I’m trying to get an overland truck up the hill all by myself. Still not.
Again.
Again.
And then it happens. He is out. And the rest of him slithers out like a slippery fish and now they’re putting him on my chest all pink and white and yellow and red and I’m behind three layers of glass but there he is. I have done it.
Now Xoli vacuums his little nose.

Now she says “I’m not quite happy” and the world swims away from me. There’s a pause the length of the entire day. What?

The cord is around his foot, tightly wrapped three times. She unwraps it, he kicks like a foal. My baby is here. He’s on me, so quick. That was so easy, I think. Someone says what’s the time. 9.55.
Bernd cuts the cord. Red and blue gristle, like electrical wire.

Now they’ve taken him already, he’s being measured and weighed.
He’s with Bernd while they help me deliver the placenta. Its such a rich dark velvety colour, its veins like embroidered seams. I want to thank it. I understand why people worship it – it seems alive. No calcification. My date of the 17th was correct, in spite of what the gynae said.

I’m in the shower now. They check me. I haven’t torn. I stink like a beer-drinking pheromone sipping dock worker. There’s a mushy substance between my legs. I realise its my vagina. Numb. Still underwater in that glassy world. I am being taken to the bed now, where Bernd has my son. They put him on my breast.

I have nothing. No feeling no emotion no tiredness no elation no sadness no flatness. The glassy world. Bernd is in love, this I see and I know this is good. But I feel as if I have also pushed myself out into the bathwater.

Nothing will ever be the same again. I suppose I sleep. I know I phoned my mother, but when I couldn't say. When I wake my shoulders are frozen cold. I close the window. The 4 am glassy light coats the glass. I go back to bed and lie next to my baby. I am also born. I will love this child forever. A neat line divides my life into what was before, and what is now.

I have a child.



And now, a year later I know that that was the easy part.

A piece of cake

It's never taken me this long to make a cake. Every time I remember where I am in the process another contraction sweeps me away. I am also repacking the bag I packed last week because I don't trust anything that I did last week. Anything I felt before this morning must have been wrong. That phrase, take the rug out beneath your feet? Yeah, like that, except its the deserted wilderness and the whole ground is being pulled out from under me as I walk.

Everything is changing.

But I must make this cake.

Where was I?

Gluten free flour. Sugar. Butter. Where's the recipe gone? Woah. Steady now. Breathe. Did you write that one down? Its 20 minutes now in between. Or is it still 25? Did you write that last one down? Is it ten actually? Oh sod it. 150 g of butter. How much is that in Tablespoons? Where's the recipe gone? Do I have enough juice in my bag? Will I be thirsty? Am I thirsty now? Where the hell is my husband? Why isn't he writing down the contractions? I still need to make a group on my Blackberry of people to sms when .... woah. Ok. breathe. breathe. breathe.

Dammit I must finish this cake. The phone, the phone. Who gets a new phone the day before they go into labour? How does this damn thing work anyway? The timer. Time your contractions on the timer. Is that the timer or the stopwatch? What the hell is the difference? Oh shit, I'm getting stressy. Don't get stressy, be in the moment. be in the moment. Make the cake. Make the cake.

In my notebook for the 18th October 2010, it says:
"Beautiful crazy day. Blood/birth/mucus show at 9ish.
Music. baking.
Bath.
Surges mostly 40 minutes apart then 30.
Sex! good sex.
Bit more blood. Is that ok?
Cake. Trying to make a bloody cake. Bernd funny and wonderful and hilarious."

There's a stringy list of times that get closer together, some in Bernd's handwriting some in mine. Then at about 6:30 they are 5 minutes apart and I write that I'm going to sms the midwife. Also: the cake is done. The cake that I started at 11 o'clock that morning. Put the cake under foil. Put the icing in the fridge. I want to be in one place now. I want to be settled. Ok Bernd, take me to Genesis.

This was a bad idea.

Note to first time birthers: do not sit. Sitting is bad. Do not sit in the front. Be on all fours on the back seat. Your baby car seat does not need to be in place yet. I guess I thought I was bringing home a baby at midnight. Or something. I guess I thought it would be a piece of cake. Car is bad. Motion is bad.

For the first time it feels like pain. Deep, knock the breath out soreness. Stop the car you fucker let me get out and walk. Wait for it to pass, this universe expanding sensation of... how to you describe a contraction? The words we have are puny: "a tightening"..."a hardening".

As the uterus moves through a surge your whole consciousness turns inwards like a sock folding itself inside out, folding in on itself. Breathe, focus, visualise. Expand.

Walking into Genesis I pause to lean at the counter before politely explaining that I am in labour and Xoli is on her way. Being the experienced midwife she is, Xoli is of course not on her way, or not immediately anyway. She had said I must only call her when the contractions are a minute or two apart. I am early. Woess. And also, the beastly car ride has slowed things down considerably. For a minute I wonder if its all true. Maybe I'd just imagined it. Maybe I can go home and eat that cake.

Instead I submit to the kindly doula on duty, who shows me where to press on the inside of my calf to help dilate the cervix. Which is of course, what we are trying to do here. But when Xoli comes with her snappy rubber gloves I hear the impossible words, "you are not dilated at all. Maybe, like your sister, you will have a slow dilation and a long labour. It could be that it's genetic. You can stay here if you want, but perhaps you should rather go home and get some sleep. I'll check you again at about 2am."

I didn't want the car. Again. But did it. With many many stop and let me get outs. At home I lay on the futon with my new Blackberry in hand and tried to time contractions. And dozed off. There is a snaky list. It seems they were about three minutes apart, sometimes more, sometimes less. They lasted 30 seconds. Or 45 seconds. or 20 seconds. Never the same.

At 2 am (after another murderous drive) she says the same thing. At 6 am the same. How is it possible that after a full night of at least as many waves as Dungeons* gets on a gnarly Sunday I have NO DILATION AT ALL?

Walking down the 200m road from Genesis to Zoo lake at 6.30 am. Leaning up against the lamp posts for contractions while commuters start their day alongside us. I say to Xoli how many do you want between here and the end of the road? She says, three. Big slow surges that I breathe through. I don't know how long or how far apart. In between I talk to her. How does it work with Notmbi, your partner, do you take shifts or work at the same time? We do both she says. I feel badly calling her because you don't have a relationship with her. But I like her, I say. It would be fine if you called her. I know Xoli is tired. She didn't sleep after 2. Didn't go home again. I am concerned about her.

Call Ntombi, I say. Apparently I will be doing this all day.

All day. In retrospect, that night was a piece of cake.



*Dungeons is a surf spot in Cape Town

An intense feeling that requires your full attention

Exactly one year ago as I write this I was soaking in the bath, observing my body start to prepare for the long haul ahead. I didn't know quite what a long haul it was going to be. I was excited. The first heady endorphins were flushing through me. I had waited long enough, I thought. I wanted to drop the fat, heavy, wriggly pawpaw I had been heaving along inside me.

A week earlier, sitting in the garden with my husband's niece, we were fantasizing about dates. The gynae's prediction of the 10th of the 10th 2010 had a great ring to it, but that date had passed without event. My calculation was the 17th. But 20.10.2010 would have been nice and symmetrical too. she's a kinaesiologist. I'll muscle test him, she said. She went through the days... 'It's the 18th', she said. I smiled and remarked that he would come when he was ready.

But still, on the night of the 17th I had had enough. I made a hot fragrant curry. I put on Johnny Clegg maskandi tunes and wiggled til midnight, bringing some euphoria into my weary bones. Early the next morning the (look away squeamish readers) mucus plug announced itself, dull period pain ache in my pelvis, endorphins making me giddy. I remembered what my yoga teacher had said: get in the bath for exactly one hour. The water will either bring the contractions along nicely or ease them off if its a false alarm.

The other thing she said was to carbo-load. And get some rest. I made pasta. I sat in the garden and giggled, marveling at how glorious the light was, the sunshine, the glowing green grass, the perfect strawberries in the strawberry patch. I smsed my friends and told them the early stage of labour was just like a mild mushroom trip. I started to make a cake. An hour between each gentle contraction, my heart swelling with a strong feeling of preparedness. I can do this. I have done the hypno-birthing course. I have done my kundalini preggie yoga. My body knows what a minute of intensity feels like, from those exercises where you hold your arms up in the air without moving. I've practiced my breathing. I've done the rainbow meditations. I've done my perineal massage and my pelvic floor exercises. I've programmed my mind not to think of the contractions as pain, not to use the word pain at all. Its an intense feeling that requires your full attention. That's what it is. I can do this. I'm ready to have an intense but enjoyable, fully natural vaginal birth without induction and without meds. Aren't I? Sure I am. Now where was I? Oh yes, I was making a cake...

Dancer in the Dark

Once upon a time there was a little girl who wanted to be a writer. She didn't know why she wanted to be a writer but her grandmother had written books and her grandfather had written books and she pretty much knew that this should be her thing too. She thought that books were cool. She read a lot of them. She thought that a book that had her name on it as the author was about cool as it could get.

Except there was something wrong with her wiring. Whenever there was an assignment that was called "Your own composition", or "Free writing" or even just "Open topic essay" she couldn't do it. Couldn't move the pen across the page. Couldn't make the noisy clamour in her head turn into black and white or blue and white or even green and white on the page.

If someone else wrote it, that was ok. So, she dictated to her mother what her account of the Game Viewing story should be like. Her mother wrote it, and that was ok.

She would wander the fields and the pathways between the mielies and stories sprung from her like those weird jumping beans that came in the post once. She couldn't say who it was who took up residence in her and borrowed her vocal chords, but voices chattered through her like weavers at a nest building convention. Her grandmother, the one who had written books, would say of her - "there she goes again, reading, without a book."

"The thing was," she remembered, years later, to her therapist, "as long as no-one was listening, it was fine. And as long as no one was going to read it, it was fine."

It got so bad, even then, that her letters, simple letters to relatives abroad, or letters home to parents, never got sent. Decades later, cleaning out her boxes of paper treasures, she would discover these little notes. Dear Mum and Dad, we are fine, send more pocket money. Or post cards, with a hippo's bum on the back. Dear Mutti and Vati, thank you for your parcel of sweets. We are fine. Yesterday an elephant got into the vegetable garden.

Years later, with Gmail, her drafts folder, always full. Her finger hesitating over the Send button, nausea clutching her throat.

At University, deadlines made her see white. White, white, and nothing but cold, expansive blank whiteness like a dizziness, like the heroines in the 19th century novels she used to read who fainted dead away. That kind of whiteness.

Of course things got handed in. Scrambled pieces of paper - Compositions. She even got FeedBack. And survived. Even quite liked it. Even though at night sometimes her face would heat up as she recalled what an embarrassingly bad metaphor she had chosen there.

When she first heard the phrase "publish or perish" she shuddered, but held firm with the knowledge that for her at least, the phrase was "publish and perish".

Meanwhile, her notebooks filled. Sometimes she wrote in the dark so she couldn't see what she was writing. She quite liked that.

And then, the theatre. She sort of fell into it, really. In the country where she was studying they had a proud tradition of what they called "Workshopped theatre". This meant that everyone had a go at it, scrapped over it, but then one person ended up doing most of the writing and then giving the credit back to everyone else. And the best ideas always got kind of diluted, bullied, led to the chopping block by the worst ideas, Judas goats of the democratic process. She kind of liked that.

Of course she had plays that she was sole author of. Plays written at computers equipped with the delete button. The cut and paste function. The Save As function. It got so bad, that one day she counted 18 versions of the same play. 18 drafts with significant but barely distinguishable differences.

And then there was blogging. By this time she had learned to play the publish-or-perish pendulum, grabbing the vine when it swung towards a to-hell-with-it confessional exhibitionism and learned to regret the metaphors later. When the vertigo got too much she just pressed Save instead. Save. Save. Save.

Save it til later.
Save my soul.
Well saved.
Saved
Saving grace
Save me one, will ya?
Saved to drafts.
I saved you one.
Save the last dance for me.
Saving all my love for you.
Save now.
For later.

Oh fuck it.

Musa

“You must show him, sister! You mustn't take this nonsense from him!”
My sister and I look at each other and roll our eyes. Its going to be a long journey. The women behind us in the bus are irritating us. Loud relationship counselling. Laughter. We're trying to sleep. But Musa's not irritated. He leans across from his aisle seat and starts to chat and join in the advice free-for-all.
“Just make peace with him,” he says. “All relationships are difficult. Life is too short for fighting.”

They get chatting and ask him what he does.
“I have the best job in the world,” he says. “I'm an actor. I'm so lucky. I really really love my job.” His positivity is infectious, as always. We forgive the vocal girl with the big hair and the nasal vowels behind us. We remember: we are so, so, lucky.

Its already been a long journey. From Lusaka we meandered in a borrowed car. From Livingstone we crossed the bridge at dawn and left the borrowed car at the Vic Falls hotel. Then we took the train to Bulawayo. Musa was like a kid. He was so excited. Those cool wooden cabins with all the colonial trimmings still intact, and he pulled the light cord on and off, lowered the beds and raised them again a couple of times, opened and closed the doors, checked the running water in the little basin under the fold-out table. He was so stoked. It reminded me of when Miranda took his son George game viewing and George, standing up in the back of the Landrover with a huge grin on his face, said “Ninjoya”. I'm enjoying.

We're heading to Joburg. We'll overnight in Bulawayo and then take the bus, where the irritating girls will keep us awake into the night. Then we'll spend a few days in a weird little mining theme park in the Magaliesberg. The three of us and the rest of the Report-back Africa team: two actors from each SADC country, the Theatre for Africa core team and the community conservation people from Africa Resources Trust, from Zim.

In a few months time these people will be one big family to me, but for now I'm the new joiner. My sister and Musa have already been working together for two years, making plays in dusty villages, creating images and props from thin air, funny, cheeky, provocative plays about wildlife conservation and communities that must have their share of the tourism spoils. CBNRM rolls off their tongues along with all the other fancy acronyms – Community Based Natural Resource Management. Musa and Miranda are a joyful, effective, affectionate team. I'm enjoying this time with them. Ninjoya. I want to be part of their mojo. And soon I will be.

But now its August 2000 and I could do with some relationship counselling of my own, time is speeding up like the spin cycle in the washing machine. I don't really know what lies ahead but I know it's exciting and important and I have to do it, even though it means leaving my fracturing relationship behind me for now. Its just the start. In a couple of months I will be in a small Karoo town with this crazy crew, making masks from paper tape and mobiles with dangling forests, zebras and gemsbok. We'll take great delight in pissing off the conservative locals by going to their church, a motley mixture of dark skins, light skins and coffeemelt skins, holding hands in the street and embracing outside the corner store. Soon my head will be awash with images – how to translate thorny issues, acronyms and political rhetoric into visuals that will communicate the plight of dusty villagers to men in suits in governments.

I'm just entering the Theatre for Africa fold. For Musa, its been a journey that started in 1996 when he auditioned for them in Chipata for Guardians of Eden. He can play a baboon, a lion, a feminine village beauty or a chief, all with great aplomb. There's something about him. His eyes blaze on stage, his presence sucks you in. He's one of those actors, the one you watch in the chorus line. You want to know him. Be around him. People did. Be around him. He loved it. He knew. He was lucky, and loving it. And just never arrogant.

He plays the President in A Light in the Night of President Khaya Afrikha. I forget what I make him to wear. Probably something garish in blue velvet. It doesn't matter. His eyes carry that show, and his knotted eyebrows, which make him look like he's being a great and concerned leader. But really, it's because he's trying to remember all those damn lines.

Two years later I'm living in Cape Town and he and Miranda are back home, and we're doing a show for the WSSD over email. The World Summit on Sustainable Development. Joburg. I'm sending them bits of script, scene by scene, while they're in the bush, turning it into magic. They play their hearts out to an audience of technocrats from across the world. I remember that line, the one that made people cry:
“What am I then? Am I an indigenous persons also? I thought I was the poorest of the poor.” Again those blazing eyes. As he played a hapless villager who travels to the big city to take his message to the big shots of the world.


Musa. This is not an obituary. This will never do him justice. I need a whole book. He deserves a whole book.


Fast forward to March 2010 and I'm getting on a plane to Cape Town when my phone rings. Its Musa.
“Tammy? We're here at the airport in Lusaka but we're not booked on the plane to Joburg.”
“What? But Musa your connecting flight to Cape Town leaves this evening, what's going on?”
They are en route to perform at the Out the Box festival. I'm pregnant and stressed. It seems there was a miscommunication with the funders who were supposed to book our flights. Its always a struggle with the funders these days. Funders based in European countries who cannot possibly understand what a mammoth feat it is to find a working internet connection to send passport details for five actors who have to cross rivers on their bicycles and dodge elephants and travel a whole day just to apply for their passports.

Several phonecalls and borrowed credit cards later and they arrive in Cape Town with an hour to spare for their tech run. The motley Seka crew with their patched together props and too-long bamboo poles and overweight luggage bills that weren't a line-item in the budget. Actors who are mostly farmers these days anyway, who set audiences alight when they perform but can't get food on the table for their families. And dear Musa, whose humour punches its way past the stress, whose hugs are as warm as ever. Who so loves the Q and A after a show – telling schoolkids about life in Mfuwe (yes, there really are elephants, yes, traditionally we hunt for food, but these days there are laws forbidding it, yes we have to look after trees, trees give us so much.) Musa, in front of a crowd. Ninjoya.

Dear Musa, I'm sorry, in so many ways.

That you had to do so much damn admin when you should have been acting the stages of the world. Too much stress, lately. Too much stress and not enough fun. Fun was your nature, your kernel. I'm swamped by memory and emotion. It can't be true. It must be one of your tricks.

I had a dream...and there was chocolate

You can't make this stuff up. Well, you can, apparently. Or at least, my unconscious mind can.

So there was a movie shoot. It was on a field the size of a rugby pitch. Bigger, even. Sir Ian McKellen was there, being a wonderful, inspiring gentleman. We were following him, Pied Piper like. I was shy. His costume was kind of Roman gladiator meets sage.

It was complicated, as these dreams often are. But what I can tell you, is that the "set", if that's what it was, was a giant maze - walls at head height. And it was made of chocolate cake. ENTIRELY of chocolate cake. And some parts, like the cement between the bricks were pure hardened chocolate. That's a chocolate cake maze the size of a rugby pitch, people, and I was - well - harvesting it.

I'm not sure about the rest. I'm not sure exactly what Sir Ian was up to, or why. Normally in these dreams I am supposed to be director or scriptwriter or lead role and I am hopelessly unprepared and floundering. In this one, I was just crew. I had my cake and... wrapped it up in tin foil for later.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that I was shopping for clothes yesterday and feeling a tad depressed at the size of my new waistline?

breaking wind

Shhhhh. Don't make sudden movements. Don't even exhale too loudly. You might break the spell.

I am blogging.

I am having a moment with my laptop.

If we're very lucky, I may even press publish when I am done.

It has indeed been a while, and the world has shifted on its axis since last we spoke. No really. It was the earthquake.

And the baby.

I have a baby now. I'll say it again, coz I never believe it when I hear myself say it. I have a baby now. Not just any baby mind you. I have Josef, philosopher child of the kind and thoughtful eyes, the wide open bellowing mouth and the gurgling drainpipe appetite. He who is patiently teaching his mother how to mother, sometimes with gentle chiding and sometimes with loud insistence at the top of those ferocious lungs.

Two blogs are not better than one
So about that two blog divide, and blogging about the baby on the baby blog and keeping this space for “me”. Ha.

You see, when pregnant, I maintained this teetering illusion that I could somehow keep a writerly self going, and reserve space in another room for the babytalk. Because not everyone wants to hear about reflux and winds and cuteness and sleeplessness. Not wanting to haemorrhage readers off this blog, I imagined I could neatly cleave the two apart.

The logic behind the two blog strategy was, I think, that I was guarding against that thing that I had heard that happens to new mothers, where their former identity + time + life + self + entire existence gets swamped by the minutiae of the baby's urgent (but, to the outside world, boring) clamours. I think I thought I would be vigilant about defending the space to write as tam the muse-chaser, rather than tam the poo-catcher and not to let the one be totally overrun by the other until I'd learned to edit my rapture.

Well.

That's not gonna happen.

This child is the everyday texture of my life now. Edited or not, the rapture, the babytalk, the tiny (and, to non-parents – boring) details of our emerging selves is all that there is.

And while there is indeed a cleaving, into self and mother, it is not neat, it is not compartmentalised. It is raw and messy.

It's like – there's a train leaving the station right now and you simply must get on it – a matter of extreme and utter urgency. You must get on this train with the baby, that is all you know. And so you do. And it roars off with a deafening clackety clack, while simultaneously slowing to a jagged stop-motion blur. And you look back at the platform and realise that you or someone who looks just like you didn't get on to the train. A ghost husk, hand raised as if to wave, or say stop, or open the door I'm getting on too- there she stands. Getting smaller on the horizon. And you keep wondering if she'll jump on somewhere else or catch a bus or catch up somehow, because you desperately need her, because maybe she knows what to do, how to be a mother, how to – slow down the blur.

No. it's not like that.

It's like - Suddenly you are a giant, a nimble, many limbed ubermom ogre who cannibalizes all other versions of herself in the quest to soothe and feed and wipe and shush.

No, its not like that either.

When I walk around the garden carrying the baby and singing om mani padme hum to get him to sleep, my mind is full of words. Stories I want to tell you, cascading glittering sentences unfurling, alive with poetry and song, jewelled with witty one-liners. If I could just get a moment at the computer, oh the stories I would write...

And then the baby gets to sleep and I am dizzy, frantic with all the possibility of what I could be doing with this entire 45 minutes... I could bath! I could have a hot cup of tea! I could clean the kitchen, blog, reply to emails, read...deal with festering growth areas of clutter...

And so I sit, and stare. Mute. Words draining away, thoughts snookering themselves down blind alleys. Aware of the shoulders (ow) the feet (phew). Things people have said to me floating across my awareness like a tacky screensaver: "it gets easier." "You must ask for help"
"You must take time for yourself"
"It does get easier you know. The first six weeks are the hardest."
"After three months it gets easier."
"After six months it gets easier."
"The first eighteen months are the hardest."

Slowly, the fog clears. The kettle boils. The bath fills. I am juuuust about to -

and then the baby cries.

On a good day, I might get to wash my hair. I suppose no writer ever lay on their deathbed and said “I wish my hair had been cleaner” or “I wish I'd done the dishes more.” But the woman who got on the train without me? She reaaaaallly needs clean surfaces, apparently.

But the point is (there was one, I could have sworn there was) is that in those weird segments of warped time which feel like hours but are actually only minutes, when you walk with the crying baby on your shoulder in the garden singing om mani padme hum, when long reels of blogworthy words flicker through the thoughts like home movies, you know you can capture it all - every tender moment. Fully realised characters wink at you through snarls of story begging to be untangled - but alas, without the time or brainpower to actually sit and do the work of stitching and cutting and threading, the words remain in burgeoning clutter areas of my brain, begging to be swept out. Blogging, it turns out, is not a big one on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

When I started this draft of this particular post, he was “15 weeks today.” Today, as I sit and revise it, with husband out of town, I realise that he is 22 weeks. For the six hundred and twenty ninth time since he was born, I realise that no-one is going to give me a medal for this. For weathering the ear-rattling crying that accompanied his first refluxy four months of life, when I could barely put him down, for the heart dropping feeling at the 1.00am wake-up (why, little guy? You just ate two hours ago...) or for the tiny victories - opening a bottle of tissue salts with one hand, crushing the tablet between two teaspoons with the other, salting his tongue with Camomilla, a tongue which is vibrating as loudly as your eardrums. Waiting to see if this works...it does. Working a tiny but treacherous little air bubble out... aah the beautiful silence after a burp breaks.

No. No one will give me a medal.

But thats ok.
Why is it ok?
Because of this.




And this



And this






this boy, who's making me into a mother.


OH – and about the other blog (I knew there was a point – there it is!) this is just me now, ok. Deal with it, or move swiftly along. These are the Poo Diaries. The muses have fled.

The Limen

The delicious inbetween.
Many inbetween things are yummy, right? Like the icing or jam in between two layers of cake. What's inside the sandwich, rather than the boring old bread. The juicy bits of grass that grow up between paving stones.

Inbetween spaces are fun, and maybe a bit scary. Revolving doors have always given me the willies. Take that South African stalwart bit of architecture - the Stoep.
Magical compared with the inside front lounge or the street outside. People sit on their stoeps and watch the world go by. They comment, or are commented on, they drink beer and misbehave, just a little, because here they can be seen, so they are almost public, but have more courage because they are more home than public. Ne?

In between times are fascinating too. Crucibles of transformation. When we undergo rites of passage we are in a liminal zone. After the rupture, the separation from normal life, we are thrust into the inbetween place where we will be thrashed about, skinned, taught lessons, made to dance til we drop, pelted with confetti, circumcised, whatever...you get the gist - transformed. Until we are spat out on the other side, reborn, presented to society as new beings with new status.

Stories are no good without a liminal space, a transformative ordeal of some kind. A crossing of the threshold of ordinary life into the world of the adventure, where normal rules don't apply and fierce tests and ordeals will strip the hero to her core so that she may find out what lives there, blazing or glimmering underneath her defences. We know this. This is the stuff I teach. Joseph Campbell, the mythologist writes plenty about the stages of the Hero's Journey. Most Hollywood movies follow this monomyth structure.

Teaching and reading about it is one thing. Going on your own journey of transformation is quite another.

Birth is such a journey, naturally. For the one burrowing out of womb and into world as well as for the vessel that needs to cross the river and bring the cargo safely back to this (now other) side. Like all rites of passage, there will be mentors and guides, those that have made the journey before, and can show you where but, ultimately, can't come with you.

I'm not there yet. I'm in another kind of inbetween right now.
I've passed through the preparation phase. The period of debate and struggle, denial and refusal. I've had wonderful mentors. Tricksters that have unwittingly tried to waylay me with their gruesome tales. The villain - my iceberg shadow fears (and oh how they multiply). The trusty sidekick who appears at just the right moment. I've chased the dragon right up to his den. And now I'm waiting. Not planning. Not dreading. Just waiting.

I am ready but I'm not impatient. I'm alert but I'm not scared. There's something delicious about this moment. Like gooey jam spilling out the cake. I'm licking up shiny drops of anticipation. I'm letting go of the rehearsals and scripts in my head, even the positive hypnobirthing programming. Doing yoga, breathing, working (yes, still working, but gently). Not planning. Not any more.

It reminds me of that Buddhist story - the man who is chased by a tiger and stumbles off a sheer cliff, with the roaring sea beneath him. He catches himself on a ledge, grabs onto the root of a tree. Above him a snarling tiger. Below him the crashing sea and jagged rocks. On the ledge next to him, a strawberry grows. He picks it. Smells it. Puts it to his lips. How delicious it is!




I have also updated the mommy blog

Is that you out there? Can you see me?

Hey I remember this place! I dreamed of something just like it once. There were words and stories. Friends dropped in to visit. I used to have a place like this. It's all coming back to me.

And then I was inarticulately pregnant, for months on end. No words to spare except for the ones needed for work, and that was a stretch. I was teaching applied drama, up in an airy sunlit room on the 15th floor of a building in town. I barely turned my computer on, for, well months, really. A heavy teaching schedule. A sweet collection of young facilitator-dramatists in the making. We played games and had earnest chats about theatre for development and character development and visual metaphor. And they watched my belly grow. And the games got less energetic. And the distance from sitting cross legged on the floor to standing on the feet got further and further. And the struggle to find parking close enough to my teaching venue made me more and more foul-mouthed.

Until one day it was over. It stopped, just like that. No more teaching. At 36 weeks, I believe it was. Though the pile of marking still scowls at me from my desk. But here I am, 38 weeks pregnant and a lot of blogs to catch up on, aside from my own. (Why did I start another one? What was that all about?) And a big restless baby twisting and turning like a twisty turny thing within me, trying to trampoline off my bladder to kick my solar plexus.

And there it is, the dull desire to write, which was thudding against my cortex like a Should knot, suddenly untangling into actual words again. Even sentences. Even in a sequence and everything.

Hello everyone. Are we still friends?

Readiness is all (Part II)

So much of what we call good theatre these days is polished and slick. Performances that display impressive emotional virtuoso, sets that are tricky and conceptual, interpretations of the classics that leave you nodding sagely and going 'hmmm', because its all so clever. This is what we want to see, right?

Or is it? Sometimes, I go to an opening night of a new offering and I think its like the Emperor's New Clothes. Everyone's saying how marvelous it all is and everyone's all sweetie dahling and congrats but I can't shake a deep feeling that its just not quite enough. I want something more - dangerous. More raw, more naked. Not so pat and rehearsed. I'm talking about a particular kind of theatre - the kind that fills the mainstream theatres in this country. And don't get me wrong. Much of South African theatre is moving and transformative, very alive and very very innovative. But even so, why does it always feel so.... safe? Maybe I'm just hard to please.

But now something has come along that really rocks my boat, lights my candle and peels my onion.

My friend James told me about it first - he'd seen The Seagull in London, performed by The Factory theatre company, and put through the cauldron of their unique method. What they do is they take a classic text, and everyone in the company learns several parts, really really well. There are no sets, no costumes, no character as such, and certainly no clever conceptual interpretation (as in, "I'm setting my Macbeth in a despotic African country and its, like, its going to be a comment on dictatorship and ambition in a postcolonial context..." blah. None of that.) On the night, in front of the live audience, they flip a coin to see who will play who. You may have prepared Hamlet, Claudius and Messenger, but you won't know which part you'll play, or which Ophelia you'll be up against, until seconds before you do it.

Then James spoke to Lucy and Lucy had seen them too and she thought they were pretty cool too and the Next thing we knew, we had a group of talented gung-ho passionate big hearted actors in Jozi ready to give it a go. We're doing Hamlet. Lucy managed to persuade the goodly boys from the Factory in London to come and teach us how they do it. They spent a week with us, and we all swooned at how delicious and gung-ho and marvelous they are. (Come on boys, you know you did too). And then, armed with a set of exercises to apply to iambic verse and a whole new philosophical outlook on our craft, we gave up every Saturday morning this year to mess around with Shakespeare.

Oh my word, it has been fun.

So the thing is, in a way, to undo the training that taught you to create a character. ("I think Ophelia is anorexic. She's a Virgo...") To resist what the goodly Factory people call being "on the bus" - what actors do when they feel a particular emotional choice has worked and so they stay there for longer than they should. ("Oh, it worked to play that bit angry. Angry works, lets stay with angry...") To strip everything that is acting and just live the truth of each moment, of each offer you receive from your fellow actor. Be a vessel for the story, and let all your acting be about the other person, not about you. To be utterly and faithfully and generously and ego-lessly in the moment, every moment.

Oh my word, it is so much fun.


We'll be having our first public showing in Grahamstown at the National Arts Festival. Not a performance as such, coz we're not ready. But a demonstration, sort of master class, directed, or facilitated by Tim Carroll in front of a live audience. I've prepared Gertrude, Ambassador and Francisco. It is going to be So Much Fun.

Terrifying? Well, why? Because so much can go wrong? But that is the point. That is the fun. That's what the audience gets out of it, too. Things do go wrong, will go wrong. And that's ok. And there will also be moments when you will look at this text with the newest eyes ever, coz you just never saw such sparks happen between a bunch of actors and these words before.

Its a dream come true. And the best part is, each show is totally unrepeatable. By definition.

Read more about The Factory's Hamlet here.
or check out their Facebook page.

The South African group is called the Framework.

Readiness is all (Part I)

Ever since I can remember I have had dreams about theatre. There's a recurring dream with variations:

I am prepared. I know all my words. I step onto the stage and open my mouth to say my line, only to realise that I am in the wrong play. This is not the one I prepared for. Everyone else is performing a different script.
Or
The audience is gathered. They are waiting outside the venue. I go inside to where the actors are. We have no play. We have only minutes to put something together. I sort frantically through ideas surging through my head, and issue some hasty improvisation instructions to the cast and we are off. We somehow pull it off, usually with the help of some beautiful colourful cloths and cast members who really know how to move.

In these dreams my roles change. Sometimes I am director. Sometimes I am performer. Sometimes I am designer (fantastic sets, great big clam-shell sails and reticulated carriages that can traverse the stage and collapse in on themselves - but then the director doesn't want them).

In my patchy career I have toyed with these three alternating roles, and also experienced the lung-crushing anxiety of feeling hopelessy underprepared.

There was a turning point though. About a year ago I had one of those dreams - big festival venue, big cast, big audience gathered outside, including my mentor-gurus from varsity days. Play not ready. So I say to the cast - its ok, we'll each have a copy of the same text (from the Jungle Book, apparently. I hand out copies) We can work from this and do our thing. But the text is wonky and blurred and the lights too dim. So I do something I have never done. I go outside and I cancel the show. I tell the waiting audeince that sorry, we are not ready and there will be no performance tonight.

The show does not have to go on if it means that it may wreck your constitution, or may be really really bad.

I think that turning point dream was the day I grew up.

Now, I've had to do it for real. I applied for my show to be on the fringe of the National Arts Festival in January. This is the blurb that's the in the booking kit for Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth:
Goddess of many names: Inanna, Ishtar, Queen of Heaven and Earth. This rare production takes an ancient Sumerian myth and transforms it into a powerful healing journey for the 21st century. Part therapeutic workshop, this ritual theatre experience will transport you into a shadowland of image, poetic text, movement and story.

Dreamed up before falling pregnant (why do we say falling? Is it really a fall?), before the trauma of Seka Theatre's trip to Cape Town and all the funding disasters that accompanied that. Before many other other potholes that have loomed at me since January. I know its the best decision, to withdraw this show from the programme and wait til it has "come to term" and has been deeply worked by the goddess-hands that will collaborate with me. I know there's no time to do the proper job it requires, to realise the gorgeous visions that have arrived here everytime I apply my dreaming mind to this project. I know all that. But it still hurts to see Cancelled Show next its name on the website. Before, I would have stubbornly clenched my jaw and ploughed on anyway, despite not having the right team together yet, the right funding together yet, etc. Just because I said I would. I can't do that now. And that's fine. Even though part of me is panicking that "its my last chance!"

However, there is something else afoot. Something so frantically, furtively exciting, so in keeping with all the dreams I have about the stage and being ready, or not. Something dangerous and sexy: the kind of theatre where everything can go wrong, and that's ok, coz that is just the point. I'll tell you about it in the next post.

branching out

For those of you that may be interested, I'll be blogging about the belly over here.. There's one up at the moment, and the usual transmissions will resume here shortly, as I feel the block may be shifting.

But for now I am in Lusaka, relishing a few days of sun and family time. Back to the bright lights tomorrow.

Until then.

Underground

At first, the words dried up completely. Or I thought they had.

Two pink lines in a tiny window on a plastic stick splattered with wee. Watching them darken.

Nodding. Smiling. Not telling.

I'm an iceberg now. If an iceberg can have a molten centre. The bit everyone can see is still sticking upright into the world, trying to get stuff done. Teaching, driving, shopping, organising painters, paying bills, organising actors to travel from Zambia to Cape Town for a festival, taking sick cat to and from the vet. But underneath, this growing bulk, still invisible to the untrained eye. A creeping, cumulative other consciousness that even I'm barely able to access, let alone share.

No, the words didn't dry up. Or freeze. They just went underground. Banking down into the earth, rooting, delving. Seeking some other place of renewal that I won't see or understand til they filter up again.

And until then I'm a sporadic blogger.

No, Minister

Dear Minister

Many of my blogmates have taken to letter writing as a quiet form of protest lately. For example, Shiny, who writes to correct certain undesirable forces in her universe, or Mud, who gently questions the strange things she finds in her new home.

I too have decided to take up this form. I have a few things to say to you. Actually they are quite serious things and I do hope you are listening.

Dear Ms Xingwana, you have been appointed as the Minister of Arts and Culture. Clearly they didn't brief you properly. Your job is not to censor artists. Your job is not to take your petty puritan morality and project it onto the works of art that cause you discomfort.

Minister, your job is to take the pair of scissors and cut the ribbon, to open the exhibition. Not pass your judgement and tell artists that their work is 'against nation building.' I may have to check my facts here, but I think another aspect of your job may be to protect our constitution. Remember? The one so many people died trying to uphold. I don't think they gave you licence to decide that some people were more free than others to express themselves. That would be going backwards a bit.

Minister, we artists have a rule of thumb to ascertain whether our work is effective or not. Its to do with the function of art in society. If a work has the effect of making people talk, or causing a little discomfort, (I know this will seem strange to you) we generally see that as a good thing. It means we have made people think about an aspect of society that needs thinking about. There is a word for works of art that confirm or impose ideologies espoused by powerful ruling agenda. That word is propaganda. Mostly, artists are not so comfortable being a mouthpiece for the state. They like to interpret the world around them for themselves. They like to create and celebrate beauty, or turn the mirror on ugliness when necessary, so that they can provide a balance against the misery they see in the world around them.

Minister, perhaps you are concerned about the high rates of rape, sexual abuse against children and women in this country. For this reason you are uncomfortable about public exhibitions of pornography. This is what you have said. Minister, allow me to explain how to recognise pornography. Usually, it is an image where there is an uncomfortable level of dominance or a power imbalance in the sexual act. Minister, tell me, in the images below - do you see anything violent? Do you see anything other than love, tenderness, sensuality?




Minister, is it because, as some have suggested, there are black African women displaying love and tenderness towards one another? Dare we use the word, lesbian? Minister, I know this may come as a shock to you but there is quite a lot of evidence to suggest that lesbianism has been alive and well on this continent for centuries, and that it was the coming of the white man, bearing Queen Victoria's flag and the Christian Church's moralities, that brought this prurience and intolerance to your continent.

Minister, allow me to draw to your attention some real concerns that you can get busy with. It is 100 days until we become the Fiefdom of the World Cup. Artists, theatre-makers, musicians and cultural activists are wondering why there has been so little invitation to share their works on public platforms so the world can see how talented we are. And what of those rumours about the R150 million that kind of disappeared, that was supposed to be for World Cup arts projects?

Minister, a friend of mine, a well respected choreographer received a grant from the National Arts Council recently. Two weeks before her work was due to be showcased, she still had not received the money in her bank account. This was a great threat to the integrity of her work. When artists get grants, generally they need the money before the work, you see, because unlike government officials they are not using that money to reward themselves or buy nice cars, they are using it to actually buy materials in order to make the work. I can't quite understand why it took the administrators of this important national institution so long to process a small bit of paperwork. Its not like there was a very long list of grantees. Please could you facilitate some sort of forum so that we the artists can communicate to those the bureaucrats what our needs actually are? We really don't want to fight with you.

Minister, every year we lose a national treasure, an artist of great talent and brilliance. We are losing these people not to old age, but to common preventable diseases of poverty, or to crime. We have actors and musicians who have worked their entire lives listening to the Muse, unmotivated by wealth or fame, who cannot afford medical care, who have no form of unemployment insurance. Make no mistake Minister, these are real 'nation builders.' We have graduates with artistic training, young people of great promise who are working as administrators and car guards because there is no vision from your department on how these creative minds could feed into the economy.

Minister, while I am at it, and I know I am going on a bit now, would you consider talking to the Ministers of Education (both of them, please) about how to improve creativity training in schools. I know there is an Arts and Culture lesson in the curriculum, but do you know how many teachers use this period to clean their classroom? I know maths and science are important, but consider the value of enabling young minds to be creative and literate as well. It has been well documented that this kind of education is essential in producing well rounded learners, and even in helping them to develop that much vaunted sense of morality that your people keep talking about. Let's not go back there.

Minister, audiences in Paris, Oregon, London, New York, are being wowed by South African artists. When these artists return to theatres in their home country, they struggle to cover their costs. Please, help to build an environment in which artists can just do their jobs. Don't tell them what they should be creating.

There is that small matter of the Constitution to uphold.

Thank you, Minister, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to read this. If you would like any other reading matter that could point you in the right direction and help you carry out your public duty, please let me know, I would be happy to assist.

yours sincerely concerned,

Hungry Nation Builder.

elephant whisperer

[photos by Freya Reder]




And then in this other dream, I had discovered the ancient secret of communicating with elephants.

Oh my, it was a beautiful space to be in.

I'm busy reading Caitlin O'Connell's The Elephant's Secret Sense, which along with Silent Thunder by Katy Payne, goes into the whole thing of how elephants pick up infrasound using spongy pads in their toes. That low rumble that just sounds like the earth curdling underfoot, rumbles they can hear for kilometres.
Its a fascinating document - some stuff I didn't know, and lots that I had just kind of guessed, having spent a lot of my younger life in the presence of these enormous ghosts. But this was different.

This was me sitting with a cache of actual manuscripts: ancient, paleolithic translations of elephant speech. Oh, and I was the chosen one who was going to be able to transmit to the world the messages of these wise old beasts, and what's more, teach people how to talk to them so that we could solve this so-called 'elephant problem' once and for all. Oh so that's what I'm here for.

And I did it. I had full on conversations with a wrinkle eyed old elephant mama crone. Words of such wisdom and depth. Not words, no, just - thoughts. Bytes of knowledge, transmitted not through the brain but the heart.

It was so cool.

I can't remember a bloody thing she told me.

Undertow

It didn't seem strange. I was there for a reason. Even though I barely knew his dad, it was right that I should be there for the funeral. It was a low-ceilinged house like those ones built in the 70s in Lusaka - complete with oatmeal and mustard tiles in the kitchen. You know those tiles, the kind that someone must have found beautiful once - a collage of several vomity looking surfaces that together sort of make up a set of mushrooms or roosters. Or wild horses running, their manes all stiff and jagged, like they've been coated in a lot of hairgel.

I remember thinking, huh - they still have the same decor.

But in reality, I have never been to this house. Nor did I ever meet his parents. This old flame of mine. Let's call him Gavin. But here, in this crisp and detailed world, I have come to mourn the passing of his father. His mother is distracted, her hair unraveled. But she says she is pleased to see me. There are ducks on the lawn and everything is tranquil.

And then, the weird thing. His girlfriend.

We hug, but there is nothing left of the old passion that used to lock our bodies together. Just a gentle warmth and that funny kind of ache you get for what could have been, but its ok that it didn't be.

She, though, is pissed off. She seems to actually hiss at me. I think,
huh, how weird. what's she worried about.

Then she turns into an octopus.
Seriously. A huge, pale, throbbing octopus with winding tentacles and a luminous, translucent head. Her eyes are terrifying but kind of seductive too. One of those restless milky tentacles wants to wrap around me. Wants to drag me down to where she is, this place of jealousy and rage.

I wake before she gets me.

A Room of One's Own

It was not an impressive building from the outside. It stuck out in the landscape, like a tired figure with a slight limp. One of those structures that should have been knocked down but no-one could be bothered to do it. Or perhaps it meant something to someone and there were plans for its renovation. It looked as if it had staggered forward, but caught itself before it fell.

Who was I with when I went inside? I don't remember. I had company, I'm sure. Or were they straying on the path, telling me to go on ahead, bored with my interest in sad old abandoned places.

The door swings open to a world of bright light, high ceilings and a vibration, the sound of a cello, struck once. I hear wings flapping. A huge triple volume room, flinging the eye upwards to a wooden level like a loft. I climb the staircase that seems to be strung from cables but is solid, and lifts me gently up. Once on the level, more like a big shelf really, I tiptoe over to the window and look down. I expect an outdoor view - the bluegums in the distance, fields, cows. Instead - another room, the size of the one I just walked through. Curious. The place is bigger than it seemed.

Look down on the remains of an old pottery. Sealed bags of clay, stacks of powdery greenware, and packets of mysterious powders and glazes, spilling onto the shelves. Something has cranked alive in me. Like an old Lister motor that takes a while to spark, I am now chugging with excitement. My heart is whirring like a toy windmill.

Looking back, behind me, the warehouse-like room I entered now seems anything but a run-down derelict building. It's a treasure house, its vaulting white walls are crowding with images, projections, possibilities, sculptures, pots spilling out stories.

Next thing, I am flying - no, zooming with a zipping noise, first on cables that are strung about the ceiling (A great theatre this will make, this is where you'll hang the lights - wahaay - woohoooo! Steady on) I am truly flying, even out the window now, and loop back in, figures of eight, tight circles and swoops. Fantastic.

I want this place. Its broken concrete where the weeds grow through, its sagging bags of clay and glazes, and its mysterious way of materialising another room every time you look through a window.

Someone appears. A sort of estate agent type of someone. They tell me that William Kentridge has booked the place.

How much will it cost to secure it for myself?

R25 000 a month. I understand, deeply, that this figure is not how much it will cost, but how much it is worth to me. I understand the difference.

Here be dragons

[Disclaimer: This post is full of complaint and whining sarcasm and offers no advice of any real value.]

I can hear my myself think and its not pretty
The tricky part of course is what you hear when you start to listen. Because long before your brain quietens enough for you to take in the angels' noisy trumpets, or the soft shuffling of their slippered feet, long before your spaghetti thoughts are lubricated by inward breath and untangle themselves, there's a deafening din that will put the entire Gauteng vuvuzela orchestra to shame.

Oh, the voices. Oh, the thinks that one thinks. The rattle and shout of criticising schoolteachers, we-know-better aunts and uncles, parents who in their loving blindness seemed to be pointing you down strange and nonsensical paths of self-regard. All the pieces of crud that you sucked up as a 7 year old, in all your eager porousness and wanting to be a real functioning member of the world. You took it all on, and somehow, somewhere, the cracked logic still runs through your psyche like faultlines.

Its been a noisy old week in this head of mine.

Because as most of you have figured out by now, living a life of authentic integrity, allowing your own voice to be heard, if not by everyone then at least by you, is the hardest dem task we have appointed ourselves. Most of us find it far easier to live the path we think our tribe / parents / zookeepers want us to live. And often that is not an explicit path at all, its just the way a whole lot of information fell into the vaccuum and was picked up and rearranged by the child wanting to please, wanting to be part of the pack, learning how to belong. This is how I am supposed to be. This is how they will love me. Most of us simply find it too difficult to listen to what the other path might be, to do as Joseph Campbell advises and follow your bliss. Or even figure out what that bliss might be.

Some of these crusty old imprints are obvious, and can be dealt with the old fashioned way, same as how you deal with cranky beasts such as dragons: stare them down, point at something on the wall behind them and when they turn around, grab the treasure and leg it. Others are sneakier, and wrap themselves around your lungs when you're not looking.

Yip, its been a noisy old week in this head of mine. A week of protest and name-calling. A week where Ms Serotonin took a sudden holiday and Mr Calvin wagged his worm-eaten finger at me.

You can't make a living from being an artist. That's not a real job. You need something to fall back on. To be a contributing member of society. Don't you have a responsibility to your family / community? To the economy? Shouldn't you be pulling your weight?

It is a real job, dammit!

It must be nice to spend all day doing creative things, I've had people say to me. It must be nice to be able to do what you want all day. Yeah. Its great. Aaaalll day, I'm doing that lovely arty farty stuff. I especially love the hours spent in the bank trying to convince paperclip pushers that I am in fact an ordinary citizen with a viable income, even though I don't have an actual salary slip. And sitting in long meetings that I can't invoice for, planning projects that have a 40% chance of coming off the ground. People with jobs love meetings, coz it keeps them away from their desks and their actual work. People who work for themselves prefer to keep these meetings short and snappy. You're giving me the job? Great. Can I have 40% of the budget up front? Thanks. Toodle-loo. Um, I'm not sure its necessary to have another meeting. It did take me an hour to get here. Climate change, you know. hahah. We can do the rest by email, seriously.

Live by the word, die by the word. Pay by the word
Writers /artists do what they do for the love of it, you see. Nothing else. Somehow, the logic goes that if you are doing something meaningful to you, that should be reward enough, and you can make do with less than those engaged with real commercial enterprise. Interesting that. Does it follow that if you are getting paid well your work is not meaningful? Hmm.

I wish there was an inversion we could do on our word count invoicing. I can do you a 2000 word article, no problem. But if you want 500 words, its going to take me that much longer. Is that so hard to understand? Come on, Writers guilds, isn't this a good plan?

"Remember," she said darkly, "all wealth comes from the earth."

Fugues

And then lastly, that unhelpful bit of myth about the creative temperament: artists and creative people are depressive. Prone to long bouts of alcoholic binge, followed by feverish bursts of activity followed by 'mooning about for days.' We are forgetful and can't be trusted to pay the bills. We commit suicide and adultery and drink too much and do our best work during bouts of insanity. We are dangerous to ourselves. Electro shock therapy has helped some.

I guess I may be proving that stereotype nicely round about now, but honestly, where did it come from, this prickly bit of pigeonholing? Those bloody Romantics have a lot to answer for. Does this have to be my sentence? Why do we buy into this, what does it serve us? Is it ok with you if I just have a quietly productive life, stable moods and a secure income? Or won't you take my work seriously if I'm not a raging depressive eccentric?

Don't answer that.

Anyway, if we are prone to such things? Is it too much to understand that this has less to do with some artistic gene and more to do with the fact that its a hurty world out there and those of us who are good at our jobs are a little sensitive. Born without a skin, the mess of the world gets in. We are the dying canaries in the coal mine, people. And we say, Remember: all wealth comes from the earth.

As the big man said,
How long shall they kill our prophets
While we stand aside and watch?

Right, I'm off to hunt down some endorphins. I believe if you swim with them they heal all your pain.