Nelisiwe Xaba

Nelisiwe Xaba Special Section Guest Editor Susan Manning Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram_a_00912 by guest on 28 September 2021 Nelisiwe Xaba Dancing between South Africa and the Global North Susan Manning The cluster of essays in this issue of TDR provides a range of responses to the work of Nelisiwe Xaba, a South African performer and choreographer who often receives commissions and tours in the Global North. Her work forms part of the rich landscape of dance and theatre in postapartheid South Africa as well as part of the dynamic scene of contemporary dance across Africa.1 Yet she resists the rubric of “contemporary African dance,” for she believes that too often European and North American presenters use this rubric to isolate contemporary artists in Africa from their peers on the global stage. In fact, Xaba’s work constantly asks exactly what expectations spectators, inside and outside South Africa, bring to their encounters with contemporary performance. Born in 1970, Xaba grew up in Soweto and started dancing “during the political uprisings in the late 1980s [...] when formal schooling in Soweto was interrupted, when the youth were riot- ing.” She danced to “find something constructive [...,] a way of getting out of the streets” (in Piccirillo 2011:70). At the Johannesburg Dance Foundation for four years, Xaba studied ballet, Graham technique, Horton technique, jazz, and gymnastics. In 1991–92 she toured the US with the South African company Soweto Street Beat, and so she arrived in the US as a 21-year- old who “had never lived alone, or had to sort out my life on my own.” She experienced intense culture shock. She felt that her engagement with Street Beat “was some kind of slave trade,” because the company’s directors provided neither a return ticket nor a contract, just prom- ises that “you’ll make money and everything’s going to be fantastic when you arrive” (71, 72). In fact, the directors relocated Street Beat from Soweto to Atlanta that same season, and subse- quently staged commercial entertainments for sports and music events. After two months, Xaba left the company. She stayed in the US for another two years, facing the challenges of immi- grant life, experiences that she later drew on when creating her two works on Sara Baartman, They Look at Me and That’s All They Think (2006) and Sakhozi Says NON to the Venus (2008). 1. For recent overviews that situate Xaba in a South African context, see Sichel (2018) and Pather and Boulle (2019). Figure 1. Nelisiwe Xaba in Fremde Tänze. The Dance Factory, Newtown, Johannesburg, 14 March 2015. (Photo by Tasmin Jade Donaldson; courtesy of Nelisiwe Xaba) Susan Manning is an internationally recognized historian of modern dance whose writings have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Polish. She is the author of Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman(1993; 2nd ed. 2006) and Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (2004); curator of Danses noires/blanche Amérique (2008); dramaturge for Reggie Wilson’s Moses(es) ( TDR 59:1, 2015); and coeditor of New German Dance Studies (2012), Futures of Dance Studies (2020), and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernist Dance (forthcoming). She is the Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor at Northwestern University. [email protected] TDR 64:2 (T246) 2020 https://doi.org/10.1162/dram_a_00912 ©2020 Susan Manning 9 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram_a_00912 by guest on 28 September 2021 After she returned to South Africa, Xaba received a scholarship in 1996 to attend the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in London. Although Xaba found the con- servatory training at Rambert “not intellectually challenging,” she “used the experience to get back into dance technically.” She also took full advantage of London’s “music, dance, film and visual arts” scene and considers her “interest in other art forms [...] crucial” to her own performance making (in King-Dorset 2016:94 –95). Following her scholarship year, Xaba returned to Johannesburg, and in 1997 she joined PACT (Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal), a ballet company where she was one of the first black dancers in the previously all-white ensemble. She also started working with Robyn Orlin, a white South African choreographer. These were the years of the Nelson Mandela presidency (1994 –1999) immediately following the dismantling of apartheid. In fact, Xaba’s scholarship year at Rambert was part of a funding initiative that celebrated new possibilities for South African dancers — black, white, colored, and South Asian.2 Asked about this period two decades later, Xaba remarked of Mandela: Mandela wasn’t my role model. I think he compromised too much at the detriment of the majority of South Africans [...] We have freedom and democracy, but unless you have education and the economy you can’t enjoy these freedoms. (in King-Dorset 2016:94) This social contradiction — “freedoms” yet persistent limitations for “the majority of South Africans” — has inflected the performance scene in South Africa for more than 25 years. Robyn Orlin created a distinctive mode of dance theatre that highlighted exactly these “incongruities of the newly democratic South Africa” (Sulcas 2011). Although she grew up in an all-white, middle-class neighborhood in Johannesburg, Orlin decided “to go into the town- ships and learn about African dance” (in Sulcas 2011). She taught black dancers during the years of apartheid, alongside Sylvia Glasser, who is considered a pioneer in South Africa for working with black and white dancers and developing a style that infused American modern dance with indigenous African elements (Davies Cordova 2017). After apartheid, Orlin’s multiracial ensemble toured widely in Europe. Working with Orlin, Xaba created roles in Keep the Home Fires Burning (1997), Couch Dancing (1998), and Daddy I’ve seen this piece six times before and I still don’t know why they’re hurting each other (1999). In the latter, Xaba appeared in a sequence often remarked on by reviewers: barefoot in a white tutu, she used a sieve to dust white flour over her feet, making patterns on the black stage and then rubbing flour over her entire body — to the accompaniment of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.3 It is not hard to see how Xaba’s independent cho- reography adapted some of Orlin’s signature elements — from the ironic and parodic humor to the evocative use of props and costumes. In 2001 Xaba began creating her own works, often solos. Early works were Dazed and Confused, No Strings Attached 1 and 2, Be My Wife (BMW), and Talent Search for New Rainbow Nation Dance Co. In 2005 she created Plasticization, considered by many her breakthrough work. For this solo she fashioned a mask and a stiff, bulky costume from plastic shopping bags imported from China and ubiquitous in South Africa. Crossing her classical training with her dance theatre experience with Orlin, Xaba wore a pointe shoe on one foot, a high heel on the other (see Flux Laboratory 2014). Choreographer and critic Lliane Loots comments: 2. The scholarship program took shape after retired British ballerina and arts patron Anya Sainsbury met Mandela in 1993. Interestingly, of the 22 dancers who received the scholarship from 1994 to 2005, only seven have returned to South Africa, including Xaba, and made their careers there. Others have remained in Great Britain or migrated to the US, Australia, or continental Europe (King-Dorset 2016:191–92). 3. Roslyn Sulcas (2011) notes the image of a “black dancer in a white tutu sieving flour over herself” in her pro- file of Orlin written in advance of her company’s appearance at Montclair State University in 2011. By this point Orlin had been touring Europe for more than two decades, but this was one of her only appearances in the US, a scenario replicated many times over in the itineraries of contemporary African choreographers, including Xaba. For a clip of Orlin’s Daddy I’ve seen this piece... see Jeannette Ginslov (2015). Susan Manning 10 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram_a_00912 by guest on 28 September 2021 This white, red and blue checkered bag [...] might have been — in past times — a woven grass or reed carry bag but now this is “plasti- cized” [...] The plastic bag transformed [as] set, costume and prop, becomes a sym- bol of over-consumption, of Chinese imports taking over African markets, but it is also a journey into contemporary health issues which often place women sexually at the mercy of plastic, in the form of condoms [...] Is it possible, her work begs, to find safe physical contact? By render- ing the female body (her own body) almost absent/hidden in this solo work [...] Xaba is offering a very disembod- ied self that only touches others through the protection of plastic. (Loots 2012:63, 65) Plasticization introduces elements found in Xaba’s later works — the use of objects that blur the distinction between costume and set, the repurposing of everyday materials, her variable footwear, and the deliberate play with the performer’s and spectators’ gaze. Figure 2. Nelisiwe Xaba in Robyn Orlin’s Daddy I’ve seen this piece before and Xaba may prefer solos and I still don’t know why they’re hurting each other. The Wits Downstairs Theatre, small-scale works but she also University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. FNB Dance collaborates. In 2008 she cre- Umbrella, 1998. (Photo by John Hogg) ated a duet, Correspondances, with Kettly Noël, a Haitian dancer now residing in Mali.

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