Inclusive, with attitude

Women have no agency and are little more than mannequins, or puppets to be manipulated by men.

It appears this chauvinist view upon which, it could be argued, modern society is based and is only now beginning to be dismantled, is the position which dancers Mamela Nyamza and Nelisiwe Xaba parody in their collaboration The Last Attitude.

A row of mannequins wearing identical tulle skirts hang upstage as Nyamza and Xaba, dressed in Jockey Y-fronts and plain white T-shirts repeat the stylised movements of ballet, stepping forward often to bow to an imagined applause, inviting, or entreating, our gaze.

The stylised, formal language of ballet, here removed from the context of orchestra, sceneography, costuming and grand stage, is made to appear almost ridiculous. A strutting, self-absorbed, rigid and arrogant form that serves technique over imagination. There is no room for spontaneity, for empathy, for response. Communication takes place along very set lines. It is a bureaucratic dance form where women have to endure rigorous, even torturous training to be perceived as achieving beauty and thus worthy of praise.

Girls dressed in corsets and tulle carried onto stage, lined up and arranged by Xaba and Nyamza with the same disregard one would give to a mannequin, or purchased objects, underscores this perception that we are witnessing a witty but scathing critique of chauvinistic society.

But I fear this is just the surface appearance of this intriguing work by these two choreographers and to look no further would not give them the credit they deserve.

To begin with, there’s the fact they are women acting as men in a dance form which once did not allow male dancers on stage as it was a form deemed too feminine a pursuit for men. And no, I did not know that before reading Nyamza and Xaba’s programme notes, which provide a new lens through which to view this work.

Their own notes invert the work so that their characters are desperately seeking acceptance as men who do not fit the stereotype set out by a society bound by rules dictating action (dance) according to gender, class, age and sexuality.

Thus these talented artists move beyond an exclusionary feminist view in which patriarchy is the whipping boy for society’s ills, to a broader perspective of how all of humanity is constrained by a system of polarity rather than unity. Equally, all are complicit in a system that tragically limits human possibility.

Nyamza and Xaba’s The Last Attitude, with superb lighting by Oliver Hauser and wonderfully droll costuming by Arlo Gibson, is on the Main at National Arts Festival until Saturday 4 July.

— Steve Kretzmann