Menu
Menu
Concept, Design, Direction: Jay Pather
Choreography: Director and Company
Company: Neliswa Rushualang, Sibusiso Gantsa, Noxolo Rushualang, Mandisa Ndlovu, Lucky Shelembe and Sandile Mbhamali
Music by Distruction Boyz & Dj Tira, Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & London Symphony Orchestra, Nils Frahm, Tyshawn Sorey and Marilyn Crispell, Nduduzo Makhathini, Neliswa Rushualang, Ryuichi Sakamoto & Alva Noto, Shostakovich performed by Riccardo Chailly & Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and James Webb
Video Editor: Karen Logan
Set: Buntu Tyali
Architecture Model: Anthony Swanepoel
Costume: Leigh Bishop & UCT Wardrobe Department
Photographer: Val Adamson
move, block, avoid, wait
turn, move, block pause turn around move block wait
annihilate, wait…
This text forms one of the projections that floats over six performers making sense of an onslaught of surfaces that assail the body in its daily waking moments. The work surface tension is an interdisciplinary choreography that considers surface – layers of topographic maps, skin, hair, metal, cloth – as a prompt to re-find the body amidst the tensions that are wrought on its frame: surface as eloquent, as key indicators, as clues.
The tension between remaining still and moving in response to the assault of unyielding surface also emerges as a question for the company. Constantly moving, refusing stillness, emerges as a strategy for survival amidst surfaces that do not allow for the luxury of stillness. Edouard Glissant names this a state of constant tremblement … neither incertitude nor fear. It is not what paralyzes us. Trembling thinking is the instinctual feeling that we must refuse all categories of fixed and imperial thought. The performers invoke ultimately, the corporeal desire to surface, defying and confronting the absurdities, blind spots, and brutality of contemporary politics.
Jay Pather is a choreographer, a curator and performance theorist. His artistic work deploys site-specific, interdisciplinary, and intercultural strategies to frame postcolonial imaginaries, decolonisation and matters of social justice. Recent works include Qaphela Caesar; a deconstruction of Julius Caesar, at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and as director for two of Nadia Davids’ plays (What Remains, winning a Fleur du Cap for direction and Hold Still for which he was nominated for a Fleur Du Cap). Pather directs the Institute for Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town. He curates Infecting the City, ICA Live Art Festival and Afrovibes (in the Netherlands) and co-curates the Spier Light Art Festival. Recent publications include a book he co-edited: Transgressions, Live Art in South Africa.
This performance is made possible through the Institute for Creative Arts (UCT), the Villa Albertine Residency and eThekwini Municipality.
