Impilo Mapantsula – Or How to Jump from a Moving Train

Impilo Mapantsula – or how to jump from a moving train. Recording the first hand history of South Africa’s dominant sub-culture and contemporary dance form. Dr Daniela Goeller DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.2592.6643 Abstract Pantsula is the main and most constant South African sub-culture, originating in the 1970s in townships and representing the identity of several generations of its black population. Incorporating political consciousness, life-style, language, dress-code, music and dance, the dance alone is practiced as an art form today, alongside other street-dances. The contribution is an introduction to this sub-culture, its historical development and contemporary situation, and argues that, given its visual and narrative structure, pantsula-dance is in itself a document – reflecting South Africa's history and the cultural identity of its population, a living legacy of the past five decades and the country's way from Apartheid to democracy. Dance as document A young man is walking around in the audience, selling sweats from a wooden crate he carries. He is wearing a pair of beige Dickies trousers and a long-sleeve DMD shirt with geometric patterns. His head is covered by a red cotton hat with a black pompon and he is wearing a pair of white Converse All Stars sneakers.1 Conversations are engaged, people start calling him, bargaining and negotiating over the sweats, jokes and laughter fill the air. We are in 2013 in a theatre in Paris and the South African dance company Real Actions Pantsula from Orange Farm, a township in the south of Johannesburg, is about to perform a full evening show called “Days of our Lives”. As the show starts, the stage is dark and we hear the characteristic sound of a train passing on the rails, hitting the sleepers: Pata-tata, pata-tata... The train is nearing; as it stops, the doors are opening. A group of dancers, all dressed in a different style, but all wearing white Converse All Stars sneakers, gather on stage and get on the train. As the train is departing, the young man comes running by with his crate. Two dancers block the doors and look out for him, calling and shouting. He is adjusting his steps, jumping on and off the train. He finally gets on board, the others let go off the doors and close them. The young man continues to sell his sweats, passing through the train. The dancers start taking over the sound of the moving train and adjust it to a single step, tapping the ground with their feet and clapping their hands. Moving on with the accelerating rhythm, they come together in a formation. On the up-beat rhythm of a house-music track, they perform a short routine. Their movements are strong, their feet are fast, the lining is precise and the group is perfectly synchronised. The sound of the train is coming back, overlaying the music and replacing it, the 1 Clothing is a highly significant element in Pantsula-culture. The main brands worn are of American or Italian origin. The cotton hat with the pompon is called topi or Navarro. Converse All Star Sneakers are the trademark of Pantsula- fashion since the 1970s, Dickies is the largest American workwear brand, and DMD is a supposedly Italian label, created by the South African company Linea Italiana (see also: Pantsula our culture). group breaks up. When the train stops again, we hear a voice: “Welcome to Johannesburg Park Station. Platform number 1 the train to Pretoria is ready to depart...” The dancers spread, some greeting each other, saying goodbye, before they leave the stage. Throughout the show, a narrator takes the audience on a journey through the reality of people's life in the townships and the dancers translate these historical and contemporary situations in a seemingly unbridled but strictly encoded flow of virtuoso movements, full of creativity and joy. Pantsula-dance is a narrative and highly contextualised dance, it is a truly mesmerising form of story-telling – entertaining and moving in the same time. The dance is itself a document – reflecting South Africa's history and the cultural identity of the majority of its population, the living legacy of the past five decades and the country's journey from Apartheid to democracy. Pantsula-dance is highly illustrative, it is an expression of black identity in the townships through movement, dress and music. Pantsula (literally: to waddle like a duck, or to walk with protruded buttocks) appears to be a flat footed tap-and-slide style of dance. Pantsula-dance pays a major reference to tap-dance and has integrated all kinds of sometimes seemingly contradictory influences. It incorporates elements of traditional South African dances, especially miming and pace, and combines them with a vocabulary of movements derived from modern urban dances, also of African American origin, alongside clownerie, contorsion, acrobatics and magic tricks. Influenced by Marabi and the South African Jazz culture of the 1920s and partly inspired by a couple dance from the 1940s and 1950s, called Kofifi or Sophiatown (after the famous area in Johannesburg), pantsula is a direct offspring from a soloist dance form of the 1960s called Monkey- Jive, that shows almost the same characteristics than pantsula.2 Whereas Kofifi or Sophiatown is still danced today by the young generation and part of the repertory of the community dance groups, only some of the older people are still able to dance the Monkey-Jive, such as musicians Vusi Shange and Ray Phiri, the founder of the South African afro-fusion band Stimela. The main inspiration for the creation of the pantsula movements comes from the street: scenes of everyday life are translated into dance and most of the movements depict ordinary, everyday gestures that refer to a specific situation. Some of them are universal and easily recognisable, others are more specific to the South African context and the reality of life in the townships and therefore more difficult to decode for an outsider. There is not one way of defining pantsula as much as there is not one way of dancing pantsula. The story of pantsula is as manifold as the people who are identifying themselves with this culture. Documenting this culture necessarily means to record the stories – as they are told by the people, shown in the dance and expressed in their lifestyle – and revealing the unifying components within these stories. There are a couple of basic or “classic” dance steps, that can be identified with a trained eye, although their interpretation might vary considerably from individual to individual, from group to group and from township to township. These steps will always appear in a specific scene – the dancers call it “situation” – or serve to evoke a specific context. The first scene of Real Actions Pantsula’s show “Days of our Live” as described above, is such a “situation”, moreover it is the key-situation to understand the dynamic as well as the historical and narrative structure of pantsula-dance. Dancing pantsula may be likened to taking a train. The basic step to get on board the train is called 2 Concerning the influence of American Jazz culture in South Africa see Ballantine 1993 and Nixon 1994. S'Parapara and it is a 4 part sequence of steps. In order to execute it, one has to get off the ground (1) and literally jump into the step. One then hits the ground with one foot (2) and then twice consecutively with the second foot (3-4). Not only is the name of the step – S'Parapara – an onomatopoeia, but the step itself is also an onomatopoeia: when done repeatedly, the sound of the feet hitting the ground recalls the sound of a moving train. S'Parapara is the one main and basic step of pantsula. “There is no pantsula without S'Parapara”, says Sello Modiga, director of the company Real Actions Pantsula and choreographer of their show.3 S'Parapara is the step that will get you started. “When there is S'Parapara, there is always a style after ...” adds one of the dancers. It is very significant that you have to jump into the dance in a way – you take a big leap and then you move on, with the train. In contemporary South Africa, space, mobility and transport remain key-issues in a country that, during the course of history, has seen almost its entire population forcibly deported from one place to another, although in very different circumstances and for very different reasons. The train has a long history in South Africa. Coming from the rural areas and the neighbouring countries, mainly Mozambique and Zimbabwe, people used to get on the trains to come to the cities, particularly Johannesburg, to find work and go back home to see their families. Coming from the townships, people used to get on the train to go to the city of Johannesburg for work early in the morning and come back late in the evening. The trains used to be common meeting places and sites of interchange and therefore represented more than just a means of transportation.4 The title of an old and famous song about the train, “Shosholoza”, is still written on some of the carriages. This Ndebele folk song, originally from Zimbabwe, is a song of hope and solidarity that has somehow 3 Given the crucial lack of written sources and documentation on pantsula-culture and -dance, the information that I am providing has, in the main, been taken from personal encounters with people who identify themselves as being pantsulas. I rely almost exclusively on primary research.

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