by SJ Naudé
What could these students understand of the era in which the piece is set? he thinks. Nevertheless, it is quite engaging. A slightly watered-down version of what Pina Bausch might have done with such material. The kind of movement piece that does not create abstract shapes, but is built around the temperament of individual dancers. The risk of injury, of damage, provides the main source of energy. Bones just short of shattering point, cartilage and sinews under high pressure. Dancers throwing their bodies frenziedly against the floor, the escaping breaths sounding like something between a sigh and a hiccup. Sweat bespattering the front row. The audience shrinking away, tingling, imagining their own bodies into the dancers’ …
As he walks to his car after the performance, someone calls from behind. ‘Excuse me?’
He stops, turns around, observes him. It is he, the soldier, hair now loose over his shoulders. Shirted. Sandals on his feet. Surrounded by light. Everything about him now in fact different. Around twenty-one, he would guess. Instantly, there is a quivering, unsteady kind of dynamic between them.
‘Yes?’
He loses his nerve, the young man, clearly unsure how to proceed. ‘I saw you,’ is all he says. ‘In the second row.’
He smiles at the actor. He can come to his aid, can compliment him honestly, albeit stiffly.
‘Congratulations, it was good. Such a closed character, so many internal shifts. The choreography gave you a potent vehicle.’
‘I’m Sam.’ His hair is shiny and black. A mane like Samson’s.
He introduces himself, invites Sam for coffee. The young man ponders the invitation for a moment, his eyes full of light and obstinacy. ‘How about the Botanical Gardens?’ Sam says.
He shrugs his shoulders, smiles slightly. ‘Why not?’
‘Come, get on,’ Sam says. He is pointing at a motorised scooter.
He raises his hand. ‘My car is here—’
‘Come on,’ says Sam. He smiles with white teeth. ‘Come and feel the wind.’
Sam takes out two helmets from the Vespa’s luggage box. Old-fashioned ones. Silver. Leather straps fastening under the chin, like war helmets. They get on.
‘Ready?’ asks Sam, and pulls away without waiting for an answer. Sam is a good twenty years younger than he is, he thinks. He has to laugh at himself. Just yesterday, so it feels, he was still young too. And where is he now, after a minute’s conversation with a young stranger? (Well, plus an hour-long prelude in the auditorium.) Like a dirty old(er) man against Sam’s warm back, behind him on the Vespa. Sam with his perfectly round little buttocks on the saddle. The two of them elated in the exhaust fumes. The scooter is not that fast, but the warm currents blow Sam’s hair in all directions from under the helmet. It flicks like a feather duster across his own face.
They stop at a petrol station, buy things to eat and drink. They continue. Through Sam’s hair, which is blowing onto his face, he observes the dismal suburbs, the walls and barbed wire. It feels as if he has never been in this city before. They walk deep into the Botanical Gardens, to a shadowy spot, a waterfall. When they sit down, he again becomes aware of his age, of the difference between them. He mentions it, playfully.
‘Age,’ Sam says, his hair in full sunlight, ‘what’s age?’, and shrugs his shoulders.
He is starting to like Sam.
It is a weekday afternoon. There is no one else here. The sun is falling in at an angle through the leaves. The waterfall’s spray is floating lazily in the shafts of light. Falling seeds nestle in the folds of their clothes. They are lying on the grass, elbows behind their heads.
‘It’s a joke,’ Sam says, ‘to work in the university’s theatres.’
Sam tells him about the piles of dusty old stage props lying around behind the stage, thigh-deep.
‘Every time you go on stage, you have to scramble over the piles of stuff. Pretty risky. In this show I had to wait on all fours on Jesus before coming on. The spaghetti Jesus, we call it. Just lying there, life-size, on a plastic cross, woven from rattan. Like a big empty basket.’
He looks at the falling water, water that will never again flow over the same rocks. Later on, they walk further up the hill. The whirring of an engine becomes audible. The water, he realises, is being circulated; it flows up the mountain and then down again, in a closed cycle. Sam hops across the rocks like a mountain goat. He is not far behind. He wonders whether all the rocks are real, knocks on a few of them.
A week later, Sam invites him to see another performance he is in and that he also choreographed. It is better than the previous one. Sam goes through surprising transformations. His hair hangs in wild curls over his shoulders. He is animal-like, with a Tarzan cloth around his loins. Stripes of warpaint adorn his cheeks and torso. Sometimes he flattens himself and creeps like a cat. At one point his arms become as long as the tentacles of an octopus. Joined together with a group of dancers, he forms an anemone that bursts open in a tangle of hands and elbows. He lies on his back and propels himself with his feet, spins and throws himself down so that one can hear (or thinks that one hears) bones cracking. He hangs from a rope by his feet, swaying, dipping his hair in paint and painting patterns across the stage. For a while, his tracks look like Sanskrit letters, but, as he continues swinging, they become denser, like ancient marks: the alphabet of a heavy-footed species. One of the dancers dips himself in the paint and, as they rub up against each other, colour spreads from body to body. Skin to skin. While he is watching, he thinks of his own mute, non-writing body.
‘Like wood,’ he described it to Sam in the Botanical Gardens, making him laugh. What he did not add, what Sam would find out for himself, was: my body does have its moments. Physical love shocks me into suppleness, administers a tiny current of electricity. In a flash, it teaches me new tricks, makes me adept. A Pinocchio I may be, but sometimes, for a few minutes, I enter the world of humans.
‘So, where does it come from, the ways you writhe and wriggle: what would you say is the source?’
The performance over, they are sitting in a coffee shop. Sam is visibly exhausted.
‘You search around, I guess.’ Sam shrugs his shoulders; a fist against his chest indicates where he tends to search. ‘You remember stuff.’
‘Such as?’
Without a moment’s hesitation, Sam tells him in detail about his family background. He has never known his father. The latter, so he has pieced together from various accounts, has been in and out of mental institutions his entire life. In the performance in which he was a soldier, he kept his (imagined) father in his mind to propel his movements. He continues. In the seventies, before he was born, his mother had a relationship with a married white man. In the account he had heard, she moved in with him, worked as a maid and bore him two children, living with the man and his wife as a kind of family. Each time she became pregnant, she had to be admitted to a mental institution. Both times she intended to either abort the child or give it up for adoption, only changing her mind at the last moment.
‘With such parents, I have to wonder about my own genes,’ Sam says with a smile. ‘But maybe, if my body keeps moving, then I could avoid going on their kind of bad trips.’
He is curious, but is hesitant to ask about the racial issue, the fact that Sam grew up as an Indian boy with two whiter children. He still carries in him the ossified sensitivities of the South Africa of his youth. He does not trust that he will get the tone right, even though Sam is a post-apartheid child. He would also want to ask Sam how it feels to attend this university, which still hosts mostly spoilt white students.
‘One shouldn’t be too full of stuff, though; you must become a vessel, a basket into which audiences can load everything they want to. You sacrifice yourself when you perform. There has to be enough space.’
Sam takes him on the scooter to his home at the edge of the city, in a walled residential complex that has recently been developed on a pale stretch of veld. Houses are dotted around, with open patches of grass and building sites in be
tween. Some of the open plots are black and velvety, the grass having been burnt off. They stop in front of a small townhouse.
Sam makes tea in mugs. They go out into a little walled garden. A warm, quiet winter’s afternoon. A square of faded wintry grass rustling beneath their feet, a square of blue sky above them. They sit down on a cotton cloth that Sam has spread out. Behind the walls there is the droning of a highway.
He tells Sam of a dance performance he once saw in a European city. A Dutch choreographer. A piece for two dancers and a cameraman. The dancers dance, the cameraman moving around them. The image is transmitted to a large screen at the back of the stage: a doubling, the video image delayed by half a second. While they are dancing, the dancers can see themselves, can observe their own movements of a moment ago. The cameraman’s movements become increasingly complicated. He gets down on his back beneath the dancers, they bend around him, become trapped on each side of him. Then the dancers leave the stage, dancing down the aisle, the cameraman following them, to the foyer, where they continue. All that is left for the audience in the auditorium is the video image. The male dancer suddenly disappears through a side door. The woman stops moving, standing still for a moment while looking right into the camera (the image on the back wall of the stage is one of desolation, bewilderment). Then she turns around and walks out the auditorium’s main entrance, leaving behind the cameraman and the audience. The last image is of her – a lonely figure – walking down the street, where a row of cherry trees is in full bloom, becoming smaller until she disappears.
‘What about her ballet shoes on the tar?!’ Sam wants to know. He is smiling.
Sam clearly likes the story. His arms are moving with excitement.
‘Let’s move a little,’ Sam says. ‘Let’s loosen up.’ He gets up, shakes the fingers of both hands, hopping, crunching the grass beneath his soles.
He shakes his head. ‘No, I think my joints have grown stiff over the years, or perhaps the rigidity is genetic.’
Sam pulls him up by the hand. ‘Just let go,’ he says, ‘there’s no body that can’t loosen itself. Nobody’s genetically stiff. You have strong muscles on your skeleton – just let them move. Just work out your body’s patterns. You should leave behind all the gym nonsense; the weight of weights settles into your muscles after a while.’
He stands there sheepishly, self-conscious in Sam’s sphere of movement. Sam shakes and flaps his own body. He makes a half-hearted attempt himself, like an injured bird.
Sam stops. ‘Ok, let’s start with the hands,’ he says.
They take their positions opposite each other, hands between them. They are looking each other in the eye. The hands start moving. First slowly, tentatively. Then faster, more naturally. The hands evade, search, play, lead each other, grab at each other, push and pull and bend and weave the air, turn around, flit and slip around each other, towards each other, mimicking each other. The knuckles click against each other, the nerves in the fingertips tingle, sending swift messages, the fingers become claws, projecting shadows onto each other, following and chasing each other, nails flash, smaller and smaller movements, faster and faster, a tiny gale is being stirred up, a cloudlet of electricity, until the hands simultaneously come to a halt and hold on to each other crossing each other. The frequencies of their vibrations are now close. Their palms are burning, as if a chemical reaction has been catalysed. The entropy is high, their hands are about to sublimate to gas. A bird with toxic green wings appears, hovering right by their faces, whirring frantically to keep still, a sugarbird perhaps, sensing that nectar is to be found in the air between them.
Still looking him in the eye, he asks Sam: ‘What are we loosening ourselves for, what are we preparing for? What is the main performance? What,’ he continues, Sam’s eyes soft as a doe’s and his skin like quicksand, ‘if you let the muscles go and then never regain a grip on them? What if they then have their own existence?’ A life of staggering, he thinks, of non-coordination and dissolution.
Sam says nothing for a while. He withdraws his hands and sits down, resting his chin on his knees, rustling with his fingers in the dry grass.
‘Last year,’ Sam says, ‘I was sitting just like this on a beach in the Transkei. Camped out there with friends. Just slept on the beach, ate stuff from the sea. Became a nature boy. We ate shrooms almost every day …’
‘Shrooms?’
‘Magic mushrooms. For days on end I sat there, just like this, hands in the sand, speaking to God. Many of my moves still come from those conversations.’ He looks up. ‘Nothing wrong with dissolution.’
After a brief silence, he smiles and adds: ‘Later we realised there were worms in the shrooms.’
In between Sam’s classes at the university, they spend time together. They drink tea, see films. He is here on sabbatical, has interrupted his professional life in New York for a while. Before meeting Sam, he was often at a loose end, searching for meaningful ways to spend his time. Every now and then he had to flee to his flat in Cape Town to escape the emotional intensity of the renewed involvement with his family.
He cannot help but observe himself, by Sam’s side, from an ironic distance, with an amused half-smile. He is approaching middle age, Sam is not much more than a child. But then: there is wisdom beyond age in Sam’s body. He has startling knowledge in the blood.
They go to a hairdresser. He watches as Sam gets his hair cut. The hairdresser has draped a black cloak around him, pulled it in around his neck. It billows, as if filled with wind. Locks fall on the floor. On impulse he bends over and surreptitiously slips one into his palm. When he looks up, his eye catches Sam’s in the mirror. Sam’s staring eye, unseeing. Sam’s body stiffens and he falls off the chair, shuddering a few times. His legs are jerking, hair clings to his trousers. He kneels down by Sam’s side. He immediately grasps it is a fit, but does not know what to do. He holds his hand under Sam’s head to stop it from banging against the floor. When Sam surfaces, the hairdresser is standing over him with scissors in his hand. Sam’s eyes are filled with terror.
It is not the only time that Sam is overcome by a seizure. One night, when they are sharing his bed in a guest house, Sam’s pumping knees wake him up. He holds him tight: a thrashing animal. When Sam comes to, the light now on, he tells of the dream he was having when the attack came. In the dream he was walking with a dog, somewhere on a gloomy farm. The dog disappeared behind a woodpile and started barking. He called to the dog, but it would not return. When he went looking, he found his father’s half-decomposed body behind the pile.
‘How did you know it was your father?’ he asks after a while.
‘Just knew it. Could feel it in my bones. He was a bum in rags, a hobo.’
He withdraws to his flat in Cape Town. He did not want to leave Sam behind in Pretoria, but Sam could not accompany him; he is fully dedicated to his dancing life. He cannot sacrifice even a weekend because of auditions and rehearsals. The family crises in Pretoria make his throat constrict. Nothing is moving in him now; he is a stagnant pool. For half a lifetime he was geographically removed from the dynamics in his overly happy, overly intimate family, and then with cosmic inequity, death and divorce and other forms of heartache strike the family while he is here. There is a tearing of the family tissue, right at the core. For a variety of reasons he is the one whose intervention is indicated, who must attempt to mend it. For a long time he had been planning to break away from his sapping professional life in Manhattan. He did not, however, imagine it happening like this.
He tries to get some rest in the Cape Town flat after a period of exceptional psychic demands. The attempts to become looser together with Sam were, it seems, unsuccessful. In fact, it probably made matters worse, challenging the stiffness when he was not prepared for it. He becomes agoraphobic, only ventures out every few days to buy what is essential. Sam’s messages pop up on his cellphone. He does not respond, lets his phone die. He stops reading emails, cuts off all communication. He spends his days moti
onless on the bed: rigor mortis on white sheets in sunlight. He stops eating, extends an arm slowly to open the window, lives on water and sunlight and air. For twelve days he descends to hell. Or, in fact, ascends to the blinding heavens. He holes himself up on the seventh floor, with an unimpeded view over the city and the bay. He stops going out at all, no longer washes himself. Makes friends, from a distance, with the pigeons as well as the homeless. He gets to know the latter’s routines. There is a man who comes at dusk, every day, to fetch his possessions from a manhole. He opens the lid in the pavement and takes out plastic bags, a sleeping bag, pieces of clothing, neatly closes the lid, his own sliver of private space. He pushes his shopping trolley up to the mountain, then down into the city in the morning, like an old woman going shopping. He becomes one with these people, if not in their lack of material things, then at least in the crumbling of the soul. (How presumptuous, he thinks later. What does he know of such suffering?) He collects small narratives that one can construct from a fixed observation point, studies the city in its shades of grey. His only conversation partners are the flocks of pigeons that descend onto corrugated-iron roofs. He calls out to them, whispers intimately to them when his limbs become heavy with hunger. The pigeons avoid his balcony – perhaps they instinctively sense his immobility, that he is earthbound. When it rains, the city appears and disappears. He observes the world through a silver sheet of water tumbling from the roof. Water and pigeons mingle with buildings and streets. His limbs let go of their weight; he is becoming light, losing substance. It is a precondition for his return to the land of the living: he must dissolve.