kagablog

This 25 minute video, directed by Aryan Kaganof in 2003, is dedicated to Steve Biko, the anti-apartheid militant killed by racist police in 1977. Two production companies are listed in the credits, “Pine Slopes”, the writer Kaganof’s publishing house, and “Silent Woods”, the production company owned by Dick Tuinder, who composed the original soundtrack under his usual pseudonym, Ramon Dos Santos.
This art video is a difficult work to interpret or analyse. It is one of the most formally and symbolically complicated. Five black dancers improvise and recite together or individually the poems of Lefifi Tladi, a poet who writes in seTswana. The choreographies are directed by Moeketsi Koena and Nita Liem, both dancers themselves, and also interpreted by two others, Moshe Maboe and Thokozane Mthiyane. The film is in three parts. In the first part, the music is superimposed and the images show a lone dancer improvising. The slow-motion matches the slow voice of the reader (lefifi tladi) who recites the lines in seTswana from his poem Gare Itshebeng. The tilted and unsteady frames allude indirectly to the unstable political system of this poet’s country, and the incomprehensible lines nevertheless leave us with a strong and stimulating aural impression, and a desire to decipher this language which is ancient and yet modern too. This ambiguity prepares us for all the others which follow.
The second part of the film is still difficult to analyse, but a few characteristic symbols help us somewhat. The filming this time turns in circles while the five dancers together improvise a theatrical “happening”, portraying a quarrel in dance, and a “tense” reconciliation. Here, once again, we feel an ambiguity in this film of the imagination. The actors tremble with emotion, presenting us with an exciting and stylised game, full of visual and symbolic grace. A wooden door, the symbol of oppression, weighs upon one of the actors (thokozani mthiyane) as the others abandon themselves to their hysterical game, in symbolic discord with the opera singer, who bursts in briefly, thanks to a lively sound mix.
The third part of the film opens with a lone dancer (moshe maboe) accompanied by Dick Tuinder’s electroacoustic music. He gives us a snake dance as the music prepares us metaphorically for the end, which is also the simple and human culmination point – the audience applauds wildly as the actors take their bows.
It should be noted that contemporary dance has always been a favourite theme of Ian Kerkhof – Aryan Kaganof. Look again at his past classics such as “Dead Man 2” and “Minnamanna”, or recent films like “I Am An African”, made the same year. Lefifi Tladi’s poetry is also the subject of a short film entitled “A Sun Dance Ecstasy”, also made that year (2003).

June 28th, 2006

Review by Dionysos ANDRONIS

translated from the french by lucy lyall grant