{"id":4609,"date":"2021-07-29T08:24:09","date_gmt":"2021-07-29T07:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=4609"},"modified":"2021-07-29T08:24:10","modified_gmt":"2021-07-29T07:24:10","slug":"old-soul-waiting-struggling-across-the-threshold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=4609","title":{"rendered":"Old Soul Waiting: Struggling across the threshold"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The experience of transition is maddening. Each moment of lucidity becomes a high-high, an ‘I\u2019ve got it feeling’ like no other. But every moment of confusion feels like a deep loss, as though you\u2019ll never make it to the other side of this frustration. Transitions are painful. You never know what life will be like on the other side. It can feels like you are losing your mind. This is the premise of Old Soul Waiting, <\/em>a work set in the transition-period of a woman who has received a calling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Slindile\nMthembu takes the metaphor of mental illness as the setting of her\ndance and narrative experiment, as\nit is often the\ndiagnosis given to people whose ancestral calling is misunderstood.\nUkugula<\/em>,\nto be sick due to a calling that has gone unheard, is often\nmisinterpreted as a medical illness rather\nthan a transition to a fuller life.\nUkuphilisa<\/em>,\nis the same word in isiZulu for being healed and being given life.\nOld\nSoul Waiting<\/em>\nplays with these multiple meanings and misunderstandings, attempting\nto translate\nthe experience of being called. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\ncharacter\nMthembu plays in her self-written, self-choreographed work traces her\nstory all the way to her birth. She tells how her mother was\nabandoned by her father. How\nher mother refused to love her and dropped her off and left. The\nstory pieces together the child\u2019s\nrealisation she has an\n\u201cold soul waiting\u201d in her; an ancestor calling. But there\nis an obstacle blocking her path \u2013 a nurse trying to keep her from\ncrossing over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nwoman and nurse dance a duet of cradle-catches and turns. The woman\nholds the nurse in her arms like a baby. The nurse mirrors the\nwoman\u2019s movements as they move around each other on a blank white\ncanvas on the floor. Dancing to the sonorous strumming of an electric\nguitar, Old\nSoul Waiting<\/em>\nplaces the conflict of the calling into a refreshing conceptual\nscene. It is set inside of a modern artistic frame that sits strongly\nwithin the world of contemporary Zulu imagination.\nThe live Maskandi tunes blends with the recorded music of artists\nlike the\navant-garde Sibusile\nXaba. There is a clear attempt at experimenting with authentic\ncontemporary form in Mthembu\u2019s self-proclaimed experimental piece.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\nthe music, this is very successful. It is in tune with the\nperformance and builds up to a black jazz crescendo. But\nthe\nvocabulary\nof\nmovement feels\nlimited and repetitive.\nThe pop-and-lock reverb effects at the beginning fade, the movement\nrelationship between the nurse and patient blurs, and the\nstorytelling overwhelms the physical intention. The dance\nfails\nto develop, overburdened\nby the effort to tell. And the telling is itself laboured by the\ntranslation of almost every single word from Zulu to English. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However,\nthe\nideas of Old\nSoul Waiting<\/em>\nremain exciting until the end. Mthembu\u2019s interventions are brought\ntogether into a neat bow. Even the gauche paintings that oddly litter\nthe stage make\nsense as the possibilities of cross-disciplinary\nwork are\nrevealed. It\nis clear Mthembu is on to something with this refreshing concept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Old Soul Waiting<\/em> is an experiment that can grow into an exciting performance. As a work that is in the midst of its own transition, it has not reached its full potential, but what it is pointing to is fascinating. Mthembu is cultivating umsebenzi wokuphilisa through Old Soul Waiting<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\u00a92021 The Critter. This article is licensed under a <\/em>Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The experience of transition is maddening. Each moment of lucidity becomes a high-high, an ‘I\u2019ve got it feeling’ like no other. But every moment of confusion feels like a deep … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":4611,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[11,1],"tags":[581],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4609"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4609"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4612,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4609\/revisions\/4612"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}