\nNamakwaland. There\u2019s a texture\nin the light, a silence in the wind. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThe russet orange land erupts in\nsmall mountains of sheer rock, sun glancing hard across the sky. Hard\ncountry, but rich if you know where to look. And look they did, the\nmining companies, the corporations, the extractors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThey prodded, poked, drilled,\nmeasured. And then they dug. And all the brown people who had made a\nlife there had the ground ripped from under them, literally.\nExcavated, processed, poisoned. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThe corporations took the\nminerals, the water, the health of an entire generation, and gave\nback nothing but hardship. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gat Innie Grond, Wond in my Siel<\/a><\/em> <\/a>(Hole in the Ground, Wound in my Soul<\/a>)<\/em> places itself in this environment, in amongst its people. Self-described as a dance narrative, it tells a story, a part of a story, of Namakwaland. It tells it with movement, with grace, with words and phrases and imagination and warmth. And with music that turns traditional hymnal arrangements inside out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \nFour young dancers in a desert\nwith earnest intentions. It could so easily be cheesy, be a music\nvideo. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n No. The tone is set at the beginning. We encounter a middle-aged woman, a working woman, a woman who gathers wood, carries water, and is much more familiar with struggle than anyone should be expected to be. We are introduced to this world through her eyes, and when the dancers dance with their controlled angular movements and footwork reminiscent of the rieldans<\/a>, it is around the fire on which she cooks, in the yard, at her house. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \nThe production holds this\ndomesticity throughout, only losing grip on reality at the end,\nalthough Timothy Bowles\u2019s Amazing Grace is ethereal, to be fair.\nStill, there were better choices than sunset and blonde hair. But\nother than this scene, which after all is not so terrible it can\u2019t\nbe indulged, the work is refreshingly grounded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The yard \u2013 or the yaad \u2013 <\/em>is part of the setting. There\u2019s people sitting around, a dog wondering through, yet the work is never amateur. Rather, it is wonderfully unaffected, the camera incidental. Except for the choreography, some of these scenes \u2013 or ones very like them \u2013 we\u2019ve seen, or we have if we\u2019ve been lucky. A local maestro on a blik guitar, aunty sitting by the door, \u2018n paar mense wat kom kuier. Just add alcohol, of which there was none here, but real as this work is, it doesn\u2019t pretend to be realism. It\u2019s metaphorical, and paradoxically quite slick, but what it points to is grainy as a Super 8 home movie. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This has a lot to do with actor and writer Esm\u00e9 Marthinus, and the character she inhabits. A character we can feel as closely as the callouses we don\u2019t have on our hands. And her story, and phrases. ‘Kyk hierdie fokken gemors’. ‘Ek hou niks van ‘n vuil naaiery nie.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n \nIt is clear that the artists\ninvolved in creating this work know the place they portray. What\nByron Klassen has conceived with Janine Lange\u2019s PhD research, is an\nauthentic, danced story conveyed through film, that, in placing\nperformance in lived space, presents innovative scenographic ideas,\nand manages to thread disparate disciplines into a tapestry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \nThere were times when I wondered\nwhat it would be like to have weaved sounds from the environment into\nthe work rather than having it covered by the soundtrack, but the\nmusic was so compelling and arranged with such originality that this\nwas mere conjecture. Sylvester \u2018Oom Dollie\u2019 Fortuin\u2019s blik\ngitaar blues is beauty all of its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \nSet in the Northern Cape mining\ntowns of Okiep and Nababeep, Gat <\/em>i<\/em>nnie Grond, Wond\nin My Siel<\/em> gestures to the exploitation of a people and the rape\nof the earth. It is also an act of remembrance, of compassion that\nfeels like rain on a land that has forgotten a time before drought. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather than taking riches from the ground, it is a gem given to all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Gat innie Grond, Wond in my Siel, is available to view on the National Arts Festival online platform until midnight tonight, 14 July<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00a92021 The Critter. This article is licensed under a\u00a0<\/em>Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Conceived and directed by Byron Klassen <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Namakwaland. There\u2019s a texture in the light, a silence in the wind. The russet orange land erupts in small mountains of sheer rock, sun glancing hard across the sky. Hard … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4484,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[1167],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4482"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4482"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4485,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4482\/revisions\/4485"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Director of Photography, Camera Operator & Editor: Ruth Smith
Actress & Writer: Esm\u00e9 Marthinus
Dancers: Faroll Coetzee, Jaime-Lee Hine, Lynette Du Plessis, Dustin Jannetjies & Lihle Mfene
Featured Musician: Sylvester \u201cOom Dollie\u201d Fortuin
Researcher & Narrator: Janine Lange
Photographer: Dale Davids
Wardrobe: Yolanda Coetzee
Music:
Irhobane-The Xhosa singers of Ladyfrere
Jesus My Heiland-Kevin Booysen and Dumisani
Die Tiengebooie-Brain Cloete, Ester Engelbrecht and Sylvester Fortuin\u201dOom Dollie\u201d
Mpedi-Phillip Tabane
Nkosi Sikalela-Stellenbosh University Choir
Amazing Grace-Timothy Bowles <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n