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Shifting the limits of performed memory
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July 14, 2009
 By Adrienne Sichel
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How far is the Girl Guides' Princess Alice Hall in African Street, in Grahamstown, from the illustrious Carnegie Hall, on the corner of 54th Street and Broadway, in Manhattan?
At the 35th edition of the National Arts Festival there was no distance at all. The audiences at that Fringe jewel, Cape Town Edge, got a sneak preview of what New Yorkers will experience next year when composer and musician Victor Gama presents his multi-media Tectonik: Tombua project created in Angola.
Not only will he introduce his extraordinary Acrux, Toha and Dino electronic Pangeia instruments - the Kronos Quarter will play his unique music which emerges from desert sands, ecological treasures, musical traditions, ancestral energies, spiritual spectres and corroding architecture haunted by the ghosts of colonialism and apartheid history.
SOL [t]O, which embodies the Pangei Art Association Cultural's credo of creating ancestral culture for a world to come, reconstructs the studies of Angolan anthropologist Augusto Zita Ngangwe Nho, who died in the 1980s in a head-on collision in the Namibe desert. The surtitled text on the filmed projections suggests he was eliminated by the South African government because his research activities were interfering with their nuclear testing.
After two solo performances of this mind-, eye- and ear-expanding exploration, Gama and his instruments (inspired by weaver birds' nests and dinosaur footprints) then joined his hosts , Cape Town's Resonance Bazar, in Turn to the Traveler, an equally thrilling (still in process) intercultural adventure.
Full Ground, the Velocity Musique Futurists, (Victor Gama, Dizu Plaatjes and Warrick Sony) interfaced with filmmaker James Tayler's footage shot at border crossings of the Oshikango, Tsodillo and Kavango Rivers.
This two-part aesthetic intervention forms part of Makakata Musique, a trans-national southern African musical initiative. Not surprisingly, Resonance Bazar's Julia Raynham drove the production and direction.
Raynham and Tayler then left Grahamstown to go, by invitation, to a dance festival in Algiers, where she recreated her Spier Contemporary (2007) performance A new body will be assembled … more brilliant than memory, with a hired falcon - and horses.
Significant collaboration was one of the hallmarks of NAF 09. As was the young, ticket-buying, audience which lapped up a diversity of art forms and staked their ownership of this cultural jamboree. Serendipitously, journeying into memory was one of the major themes this year on the Main and the Fringe (which was loudly being proclaimed by many a seasoned festivalgoer as the "new Main" because of its high quality).
Very few artists know how to ransack history and make it explosively tactile like Brett Bailey does. His series of installations (on the Main's new Performance Art slot) titled Blood Diamonds/ Terminal evolved at Grahamstown station and in the old cemetery.
A playing card gained individual entry to this impeccably curated performance featuring 70 men, women and children from Rhini and Joza townships. A child guide clutched each viewer's hand as tableaux of post-colonial and post-apartheid carnage, poverty, decay and dispossession seeped from the rail way tracks or flickered over graves. This has to be Bailey's most ruthlessly emotional artistic manifesto at the festival he started out at.
Equally powerful and dealing with many of the same issues were Magnet Theatre's trainees, under the delicate direction of Mandla Mbothwe, who dazzled in ingcwaba lendoda lise cankwe ndela (the grave of the man is next to the road), about ritualistic tales of the people who leave their impoverished communities by foot on the N2 for Cape Town.
In The Crossing, performed in a classroom at Victoria Girls, Zimbabwean actor, writer and crafter Jonathan Nkala, directed by his collaborator Bo Petersen, re-enacted and mimed his journey over the Limpopo for a better life in Joburg. After taking his bow he removed his wire art props to sell them, and his printed plays (published by Junkets), at the door.
This was just one of many instances when boundaries of who performed what, where, how, and with whom, were blurred, or gloriously redefined.
Dance continued to be a major draw card for all ages. Dada Masilo's de-romanticised Carmen enthralled the initiated and stunned the uninitiated with her choreographic sophistication and electric neo-classicism.
In her interpretation of the lead role, Carmen is pure streetwise kasi meets Jozi .Gustin Makgeledisa's Jose and Mpho Masilela's Escamillo added fuel to the dramatic fire.
Johannesburg's Inzalo Dance and Theatre Company and Madagascar's Vanihala Dance Company created the confrontational Pourkoipa...!, featuring Moeketsi Koena and Gaby Saranouffi in an imaginative, gut-wrenching collaboration.
Grahamstown's First Physical Theatre Company proved why it deserves its national profile.
Juanita Finestone-Praeg's inner piece (in the old Nun's Chapel) resonates with invention and intellectual vigour.
And say hello to startling, notable, talents: First Fizz dancer, stilt artist and clown, Richard Antrobus; Ayanda Phewa of A Face like Mine and Sonja Smit (New Voices 2009).
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