Playhouse Dance Company.

STELLENBOSCH, SOUTH AFRICA JANUARY 10-13 1996

What place does formal theatrical dance have in the new South Africa? Long a bastion of classical dance (the heritage of its colonial past) with three subsidized ballet companies, and little in the way of contemporary dance in its prereform days, the nation looks set to change with the new overseers of culture looking with fresh eyes at the allocation of funds. The subsidies of the performing arts boards, which fund theater, opera, and dance companies in different regions, have already been cut, and there is more and more evidence of a turn to U.S.-style corporate and private sponsorship in the arts.

Watching performances by the Cape Town-based CAPAB Ballet and the Durban-based Playhouse Dance Company is to see two very different responses to this imminent crisis in the world of institutionalized dance. Even more markedly than PACT Ballet in Pretoria, South Africa's other large ballet troupe, CAPAB has long been a repository of the traditional repertoire, concentrating on well-known classics and evening-length story ballets that choreographer-director Veronica Paeper produces with remarkable frequency. This formula seems to have been reasonably successful in the past (and Paeper has occasionally provided opportunities for promising younger choreographers, notably Mzonke Jama [see Reviews/ International, November 1992, p. 111], but watching The Snow Queen and The Merry Widow over the Christmas/New Year season made me wonder just why the company is digging its heels so resolutely into this shallow niche.

Both works contain adequate if unmemorable choreography (by former CAPAB Ballet director David Poole and Paeper, respectively), set between overblown crowd scenes, melodious scores (Tchaikovsky and Lehar), and lob of decor and costume changes. Both package unchallenging dancing in lob of wrapping and offer it with complacency. (Judging from the average age of the audience, most spectators had probably seen the productions before and liked them enough to come again.) Neither work is concerned with showing what ballet can be, but rather with providing a pleasant evening at the theater. If The Snow Queen and The Merry Widow were superbly danced, CAPAB might get away with the general mediocrity of artistic intent, but this is not the case. While The Merry Widow benefited from guest artist Rex Harrington's excellent performance in the role of Danilo, the accomplished Carol Kinsey's eponymous widow, and Tracy Li's pert Valencienne, The Snow Queen showed weaker dancers in the principal roles (excepting the inexperienced but promising Candice Brathwaite, and the immensely talented Janet Lindup in a brief but sparkling rendition of the Fire Princess) and a somewhat ragged corps de ballet.

There is no reason why the new South Africa should not retain, or take further to, toe dancing and tutus: one of the most exciting features of current artistic activity (and one of the most potently optimistic metaphors for the country's future) is the range and fusion of western and African art forms to be found all over the country. This is not to say that classical dance should not continue to exist in its pure form (I hope that it does), but in order to create audiences of the future, ballet companies will both need to show works of excellence, with poetry and genius that can move people to want to know more--and also, probably, to move down the lane of political correctness, encouraging black dancers and choreographers to bring elements of their culture to create works that potential audiences can understand and relate to in a more immediate fashion.

Playhouse Dance Company, albeit on a much smaller scale and without many of the financial constraints that must plague CAPAB (which has a much larger overhead), seems to be attempting to move in these directions. Formerly NAPAC Ballet, Playhouse Dance, directed by Mark Hawkins, is based in Durban on the Indian Ocean and showcases a range of classical and contemporary choreography with a strong South African bias. A short Cape Town season showed the sixteen excellent dancers in selections from the repertoire that included a too-short extract from Shion Unser's funky Interlude (three men leaping and rolling in tutus and helmets), Gary Gordon's complex and sophisticated ensemble work, Travellers (to Kevin Volans's beautiful score, "White Man Sleeps"), and a male pas de deux from Brother Brother by Ntsikelelo (Boyzie) Cekwana. Set to Vivaldi's Magnificat and Gloria, this last piece is a sculptural and haunting evocation of loss in which two men move closely together, lifting and curling around each other, their lack of eye contact suggesting that the unremitting presence of the other is possibly more mental than physical. Like the other pieces on the program (even the less interesting ones), Brother Brother was danced (by Andrew Gilder and Ebrahim Medell in the cast that I saw) with passion--perhaps the essential ingredient if South African audiences are to be persuaded that dance is both important and meaningful.