SOUTH AFRICAN UPDATE.

JOHANNESBURG--The survival of South Africa's remaining state-funded professional classical and contemporary dance companies is threatened. The crunch date is March 1999 when, in terms of the new cultural policy established following the 1994 democratic elections, all automatic government funding finally dries up. The new dispensation breaks away from the old formula of channeling millions of rand exclusively to the five performing arts councils.

The state has undertaken to fund the operation of the country's four opera houses, a strategy that seeks to provide access to funding for all South Africans and all cultural forms, not just an elite few as during the apartheid era. Hypothetically, all artists who can afford to hire the theaters can make use of these complexes. There is a difficult history, however: when some of these houses were built, access was denied on the basis of race. After segregation was dropped, many sectors of the population boycotted both the performing arts companies and the buildings.

The new system requires artists to apply to the newly founded National Arts Council and to the Arts and Culture Trust of the President for project funding. Company infrastructure now has to be sustained through other sources. The problem is that everyone has to share a shrinking funding pie.

The first casualty, last March, was the twelve-year-old Playhouse Dance Company (formerly Napac Dance Company) in Durban, KwaZulu Natal. The year-old cross-cultural Siwela Sonke Dance Company, which fell under the umbrella of the Playhouse Company, survives temporarily on a residency basis. Former Playhouse Dance Company artistic director Mark Hawkins has formed the Fantastic Flying Fish Dance Company, which had its official launch, using an NAC grant, in Durban in September.

Also threatened by the changes in funding are Cape Town City Ballet and Jazzart Dance Theatre in Cape Town, and State Theatre City Ballet and State Theatre Dance Company in Pretoria. In September the two classical companies collaborated for the first time ever, performing the premiere of Veronica Paeper's Work in Progress and Choo-San Goh's Unknown Territory and Configurations (both staged by Janek Schergen) in Cape Town and Pretoria.

During the apartheid years, despite the dominance of arts councils, there were several nongovernmental organizations paving the developmental way. In Johannesburg, pioneering choreographer, teacher, and dance anthropologist Sylvia Glasser's Moving Into Dance company celebrated its twentieth anniversary in October at The Wits Theatre. MID has become renowned for its specialization in Afro-fusion, contemporary African dance, and its "edudance" program. The historic revivals of signature Glasser works provided perspective for the new choreography by MID graduates, including associate artistic director Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe, whose Sasanka was commissioned by Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1997.

In September an ongoing multidiscipline cultural exchange called Nordic Shuttle '99 resulted in five dancer-choreographers from Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland performing solos and doing workshops at The Dance Factory's annual festival. Six South Africans, from around the country, also performed and participated. The entire Shuttle, which also includes literature, music, visual arts, theater, and video, will be launched at the State Theatre Opera House in March 1999, when the State Theatre Dance Company performs a contemporary King Lear by Swedish choreographer Marie Brolin Tani. Set to a Carl Nielsen score, the work premiered in January 1998 in Denmark with Scandinavian dancers.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returned to South Africa in September. The company gave two weeks of performances of three programs at the Johannesburg Civic Theatre and a three-day outreach program in the inner cities and townships. Master teacher Milton Myers, in his first visit to Africa, gave master classes to teachers and dancers on the Horton technique.

The Ailey company's comprehensive out reach, coordinated by Dance Alliance on a National Arts Council grant, culminated in an audition for a bursary to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center in New York City, which was awarded to Solomon Matea from Mamelodi, Pretoria. A highlight of the Ailey season, which also featured the world premiere of Redha Benteifour's physically explosive Lettres d'Amour (to be seen at Manhattan's City Center this month), was the staging of Ailey's Memoria incorporating thirty South African dance students.

The year winds down in White City, Soweto, with Soweto Dance Theatre's fifth "Step Afrika," from December 7 to 19. This is a unique partnership between Jackie Mbuyiselwa Semela's company and Brian Williams and the stepping Phi Alpha Phi fraternity brothers of Howard University in Washington, D.C.

Cape Town offers a Jazzart Dance Theatre premiere entitled duck 'n DANCE (a faerietale?) at the Nico Arena, December 19 to January 16. This African Swan Lake is a collaboration between Jazzart director Alfred Hinkel, Jagged Dance's Debbie Goodman, and stuntmaster and trapeze specialist Mo Marais, and is set to an original score by Rene Avenant, which, Hinkel says, "remembers Tchaikovsky." The principal male role will be danced by a female--Sbonakaliso Ndaba. The cross-gender swans wear tulle-frilled costumes with built-in fly harnesses. The designs are based on bulletproof vests, apt for violence-wracked South Africa.