Gregory Maqoma’s emotional last dance
At just after 6pm on Wednesday, 28 June, Gregory Maqoma bent down and flattened his right palm on the Rhodes Theatre stage and, as a dancer, said good-bye to the National Arts Festival for the final time.
It was an emotional moment, one of many at the end of a moving performance of Exit/ Exist as the 49-year-old acknowledged his technical team and a rapturous audience. Maqoma will have farewells overseas and a gala event in South Africa is planned for October — when he turns 50, but this was his faultless dancer’s farewell to a festival which he has also graced as a choreographer and innovator.
A personal piece with a national significance, Exit/Exist examines the life of one of Maqoma’s ancestors, the rebellious Xhosa chief Jongumsobomvu Maqoma, who challenged British rule and was imprisoned on Robben Island where he died in 1873.
Maqoma (the dancer) explored the ancestral echoes connecting him with that history; first shimmering with urban slick in a silk suit, then moving through a process of initiation and ritual observance in a cowhide tunic into the memory of his rural ancestor.
Maqoma’s movements weaved through and channelled the moody music from outstanding vocalists Tobela Mpela, Sizwe Nhlapo, Lubabalo Velebayi, Sipho Melange and the guitarist Giuliano Modarelli.
It was a performance of effortless elegance, a trademark of a career marked by such grand achievements as Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Boléro.
At one point, Maqoma was moving around the stage with a metal plate balanced perfectly on his head, even as he whirled under a stream of yellow sand falling from up ahead — a moment to beggar belief.
Makhanda has, by the accounts of those already hardened by opening weekend, been encased in a blanket of drizzle. It has been dank and grey, causing The Ballast (a regular accomplice of this writer) to observe that veterans of the previous five days of the National Arts Festival have started sprouting moss for facial hair.
The Ballast is so named for the stability and girding he brings to festivals which, with their relentless consumption — of theatre, music, art, dance, drink, ideas, drugs, things to pick you up, slam you down and shut you up — require constitutions more enduring than South Africa’s.
He also brings a keen eye to proceedings. The Ballast noted the visually engaging premise behind choreographer Nelisiwe Xaba’s Fake News at Graeme College. A playful dance piece that provokes a revaluation of the audience’s positionality in the current information chaos: its dancers contortions and movements on the floor being filmed and projected onto a screen, rendering them with new and multiple meanings.
The quartet KEMiStry <, comprising Mageshen Naidoo (guitar), Kyle du Preez (trombone), Swiss bassist Eva Kess and Sphelelo Mazibuko (drums) performed a set at DSG washed with emotions, memories and safe spaces, epitomised no better than a rendition of Warwick Junction.
A composition by Naidoo, a Durbanite, it captured all the energy of one of the city’s major transportation and cross-pollination hubs. Naidoo said the piece was inspired by his childhood Saturdays spent there with his mother, who shopped at the market. The guitarist remembered her “wisdom” in holding his hand and lingering at the maskandi artists performing under the bridges — a defining and foundational musical memory for the musician and academic.