Home is where the 'art is
by Khara-Jade Small
At the top of the staircase at the Durban Art Gallery (DAG), a swing is transfixed. Its welded chains squirm, suspending an empty seat in midair.
A playground is the first stage/ installation of 'Home', the Siwela Sonke Dance production, directed by Jay Pather. In terms of its association with the home, especially the family, the work straddles the passage between the private and the public. This particular playground, however, seems more like one of those mostly deserted and dangerous urban spaces. Here play is rare, if not extinct, and the domestic and the public are estranged.
The production builds and deconstructs complex layers of meaning, both expressed and withheld. The narrator is a paradox. Most of the audience will not understand a word he speaks as it is entirely in Tamil (if I'm not mistaken). His character is at times comic and tragic; clown-like even though he is unexpectedly an oddly prophetic figure, taking the audience through each home space.
Although it could be argued that the visual arts take a back seat to dance theatre, for me they figure as more than stage-props (although admittedly at times they do come too close to being that). The video installation by Storm Janse van Rensburg, a cityscape procession of anonymous buildings, shot through a moving vehicle, is less a setting or a background for the action in the playground, than a powerful narrative agent.
The production's collaboration of dance, theatre, music and visual art patches together and displaces these forms in its exploration of the private spaces that are home. A kitchen, a lounge, a migrant worker's cubicle, a hotel room are erected like shrines. Gaston Bachelard, writing in The Poetics of Space assigns the home space a fundamental status in the psychic economy. He says: "Space, in any case, is never neutral; it is filled with ideologies". And, even before the performance the silent constructed spaces have a sense of potent meaning, which is quite palpable.
Jay Pather, whose director's notes are included in the programme, adds: "These tiles, furniture and domestic props were found to hold imprint upon imprint of hopes, dreams, stuff of humanity heavily concentrated and densely packed". The communion of the spoken and the unspoken, charged space and the performer who inhabits that space creates a powerful hybrid: a theatre of imagery. After watching the performance, I found that it is the images constructed within the combination of dance, video and set that were fixed in my mind.
In a bare kitchen are a table and an old cupboard, filled with Lucky Star pilchard tins. Above the cupboard one of the dancers hangs motionless as Christ on the crucifix while a woman sits next to it staring past the audience, her face caked with red mask. She is an unmistakable figure in the domestic imagination of South Africa, a kind of holy maid.
A migrant worker is feverish in his white cubicle, while three brides dressed in white dance beside him. Projected behind him images of worker's beds and sleeping spaces. These are numbered as if catalogued, and come loaded with implications of ownership.
The business of settlement is critical: staking out territory, demarcating, designing and inhabiting a territory defines the activity that is home. What of the person who has no real claim to the space in which they live, or are made to live: the squatter, the migrant worker, the domestic worker, the homeless? Who controls that space and defines its boundaries? Here we move from settlement to unsettlement, from roots to rootlessness, from home to exile.
This idea is reflected in the nomadic quality of the production itself. The audience moves from room to room, following the players and taking ownership of each space with their gaze. Established boundaries between performer and audience, between private and public spaces are broken down and subverted.
Of course, there is comic relief at times. In one space an Indian woman in a monumental dress floats in on a tea trolley, goddess-like, while her husband, wearing a shirt saying Basketball is Life watches television in the lounge. They mime. She washes the dishes and prepares food while he eats and gets very excited about what's on TV. When she does not respond to his calls he goes in with a rifle and chases the man pushing the tea trolley out from underneath her skirt. It is all very funny in a Kumars at No.42 kind of way.
Later two dancers wearing red clown noses perform between coloured doors on wheels, teasing each other and playing. But even then, there is an uneasiness that sits under the surface reflecting the tragi-comic paradox at the centre of all homes. As the director notes, the images that emerge are, "fertile, both funny and sad, sometimes disturbing, sometimes affirming".
The same clown character becomes a poignant figure in the final scene with the full company where he carries a suitcase that he packs and unpacks. In this scene a video of the sea by Greg Streak is projected on the wall behind the dancers. The video, a bird's eye, close-up shot of the swelling and shifting water, brings to mind Berni Searle's 'Float' series. Again the visual art became architecture for the action of the dancers.
Within this collective of pink fluffy slippers, hotel-rooms, Xhosa-like figures painted in white wearing sunglasses and veils, kitchen tables, brides and basins, the domestic space is politicised and poeticised so that the ordinary becomes miraculous and the ritual of the everyday becomes a "record of our past and a portent of our future", as Marilyn Chandler wrote in Dwelling in the Text. 'Home' is indeed where the (he)art is.
Khara-Jade Small is a Masters in Fine Art student at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg.
October29 - November 9
