By BRUCE DENNILL
Moving Into Dance: Rites And Rituals / Choreography by Sylvia ‘Magogo’ Glasser and Esther Nasser / Lesedi, Joburg Theatre, Braamfontein, Johannesburg
Moving Into Dance’s Rites And Rituals is a triumph of programming, bringing together works old and new, youngsters and established professionals, and two of South African dance’s best-known choreographers in Sylvia ‘Magogo’ Glasser and Esther Nasser.
Glasser founded Moving Into Dance in 1978 as a mixed-race company and training school, an extraordinarily courageous move for the time. Her respect for South Africa’s many cultures is also reflected in Stone Cast Ritual, which won Glasser the FNB Vita Dance Umbrella Choreographer of the Year Award in 1995. The piece may be over 30 years old, but it hasn’t aged a day and, for first-time audiences, it is still breathlessly arresting, its mix of tightly controlled movement and percussive polyrhythms immediately capturing attention and then welcoming observers to enmesh themselves in all the unfolding facets of a long piece that tests the fitness, stamina, focus and physical and rhythmic control of the eight dancers involved.
The arc of the piece includes slow-building patterns in which each dancer echoes the actions of the one ahead of them, with and without backing music and then passages of frenetic maneuvering with and around each other, requiring enormous amounts of energy, corralled by strict discipline. Such carefully designed pacing ensures that the athletes have a chance to avoid getting too tired to maintain the intensity that gives Stone Cast Ritual its incredible, sustained impact.
As a palate cleanser before the other professional piece (and a chance for the Moving Into Dance troupe to refresh themselves and change costumes), dancers from grades 10, 11 and 12 at the National School of the Arts combine in a piece called Quasar – The Energy, which lives up to the second part of that title through Laura Cameron’s animated choreography. The dancers are divided into separate groups that allow them to showcase their different levels of capacity and fluidity of movement, with the cohorts interacting gracefully and the young dancers showing admirable calm and control in their interactions with each other and the audience.
Rites Of Spring has its tone set early on by the eponymous composition by Igor Stravinsky. The music and the 1913 ballet it was originally written for caused riots then because of the jarring, cacophonous nature of the music, and it retains that character and unsettling tone over a century later. To this formidable foundation, Esther Nasser adds choreography designed to highlight and confront gender-based violence and the various levels of confrontation it involves. The result is at times a purposefully uncomfortable watch, kind of like The Handmaid’s Tale meets boot camp, in which the 16-strong company throw themselves around, throw each other around and generally match the passion of the music. Again, there are dips in tempo where the dancers can collect themselves for the next passage of concentrated fury, meaning the conclusion of the piece, and the production, leaves the audience with heart rate as pumped up as the orchestra barrelling through Stravinsky’s score.
A fine showcase of an excellent company and work worthy of their talents.