The title refers to a comment by a theatre critic of my production Qaphela Caesar! Theatre and dance criticism in this country is rare, and in many respects these art forms are uninterrogated beyond a simple judgement of whether an audience may or may not like a production.
It is not my intention to challenge much of that. My intention is also to unpick the work in the quest for something that contributes to the field of literary dance in a substantial wayβbe it at the intersection of media, the various sites of the works, the perpetual interplay between tradition and modernity, or the collaborative processes of research and creation. I subtitled Qaphela Caesar! I examine three productions Body of Evidence , Qaphela Caesar!
The context and subject of these mixed media productionsβmemory and apartheid, truth and reconciliation, the spillages, slippages, overflows of emotion, the attempts at making meaning and the desire for reconstructionβlead me to consider form in our society, its multiple manifestations, its colonial roots and its rhizome-like appearance.
In art making, one impulse in the face of such a conundrum may be to weed out, clean up, reduce and essentialize. And it is not always palatable, nor easy to digest.
In considering the three productions, I focus on a dominant choreographic research approach in each. Embodiment and collaborative research in Body of Evidence In the early s, Dr Leonard Lehrer, a forensic scientist at the University of Cape Town, approached me with some alarming findings as a result of examining bodies that had met their end through violent means in the Eastern Cape Province.
