FNB Vita Dance Umbrella.

WITS THEATRE, JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA MARCH 1-16, 1996

The South African Dance Umbrella is rather less well known than its British counterpart, from which arts consultant Phillip Stein and local dance writers took inspiration when the festival was created in 1987. In less than ten years, however, it has grown from a modest presentation of pioneer dance groups into a large-scale annual event that aims to provide "a democratic platform for the development of all South Africa's dance forms."

Democratic it certainly is: dancers of all levels, status, and style may enter, and the result is an event thrillingly free of the carefully preselected rosters that underpin most festivals--though the whole is sometimes exhaustingly unwieldy. This year, some 120 works were divided over five scheduled programs and two all-day presentations (destined for youth groups and first-time performers) entitled Stepping Stones. Despite an attempt by the organizers to lend some clarity to proceedings by dividing the program into Fringe (new work) and Main (commissioned or invited work) sections, the sheer diversity and number of contributions fight against any artistic coherence. Amateurs and professionals, small children, teenagers and adults; belly-dancing, ballet, Indian and Spanish dance, tap, traditional and urban-influenced African dance, contemporary and jazz dance, European-flavored dance-theater--all rubbed shoulders in good-humored and indiscriminate fashion. The effect was predictably hellish on the critical faculties.

The best of the festival's contributions suggested the dance legacies from which a uniquely South African dance idiom might emerge--from the razorsharp synchronization of David Lekhobane's Mapantsula danced by the Via-Katlehong Pantsula Group, whose members combine break-dance legs with the loose, elegant upper bodies of great tap dancers, to Simon Nkosi & The Creators's sensational Dlala Gumboot Dance, which inflected the urban tradition of mine-dances with a cheeky theatricality. Robin Orlin's The Polka Dot Lives On, made for the Soweto Dance Theatre, gave a gritty, fantastical edge to an urban African context, as the five dancers manipulated the kind of brightly colored plastic plates used here by street vendors with an obsessiveness reminiscent of Pina Bausch. Collecting and dropping them ceaselessly, laying them out and then hurling themselves across the neat rows, eating an apple off a woman's body, alternately fighting and bonding, the impressive dancers performed with deadpan, numbed intensity.

In Arco Matlala's After Midnight, performed by his talented Roots company, the mixed idioms of the two South African anthems (the multilingual "Nkosi Sikelela" and the Afrikaans "Die Stem") formed an unlikely musical background to American-flavored, jazzy dancing and the mimed interpretation that seems to play an important part in township dances and songs. On the same program, Vusubantu Ngema's Last Days Lust, to music by Jonas Gwangwa and Salif Keita, provided a stylized, abstracted rendering of a community at the mercy of the elements and of one another. Largely using ordinary movement (Judson Church in Africa?), Ngema shows his white-shrouded figures as pawns in a landscape of poverty and suffering, displaying a theatrical sense that transfigured the apparent simplicity of conception.

In this culturally complex context, the festival's major invited work, Gary Gordon's The Unspeakable Story, probably lost much of the resonance it would have had in another setting. A finely crafted and nuanced dance-theater piece about the suicide by drowning of the mother of surrealist painter Rene Magritte, The Unspeakable Story was beautifully staged and performed (by the First Physical Theatre Company), immensely pleasurable to watch, and yet somehow diminished in impact by having to share a program with the works it did.

On a different program, Ranjit Lalloo's Where Deserts Meet offered an interesting exploration of Indian dance with tentative African overtones, set to similarly multicultural music by Zakir Hussein. In an even more determined push over racial and cultural frontiers, Andile Sotiya, a black ballet-trained dancer, presented Lessons Unlearned, an inventive if slightly overemphatic first work on the theme of the Holocaust, creating brutal, stamping, swooping movements for the despairing lines of women, who alternately huddle and flail in front of a frozen tableau of a sabbath meal.

This diversity and unpredictability testifies to both the health and the predicament of Dance Umbrella. Can the festival provide a platform for new work, a yearly stage for community-based groups, a forum for choreographic growth, and a showcase for established choreographers? Whatever the answer, Dance Umbrella and its private sector sponsor, First National Bank, are clearly playing a vital role in building up a contemporary dance culture that--like much else in South Africa--has to reconcile radically different histories, traditions and privileges. As the futures of the state-funded national ballet and contemporary dance companies hang in the balance, the festival's role--in making visible the country's abundance of talent and creativity, and its need for training resources and professional structures--is all the more important.