While watching the piece tears rolled down my face at a sense of cultural loss (my own) and beauty to witness dance/art without pretense, without superimposition of intellectualism, without technological over stimulus. However I felt an over stimulus of emotion (thankfully) to experiencing a contrast of my perspective as a white middle class female living in  Seattle with Boyzie Cekwana’s proposal to expose male exploitation in Southern Africa and its relationship to the HIV virus.  The evening was charged with expressive necessity and commitment to use the stage as a vehicle for cultural change. The space was impacted and I was immersed. As an American, I feel disconnected to a sense of necessity for life; my world is padded with layers of commercial production, complex bureaucratic systems, and delusive media coverage.  After viewing Cekwana’s performance I saw a source, I saw them meddle and fester in it; ruminating in their cultural environment, landscape, ritual, injustices; taking this and through an explosion of rhythm, song and dance they demanded my attention, demanded to be heard. So I listened. Thank you for the push and reminder.

The performances were extremely interesting and unusual especially the second piece Ja’nee. While leaving me over-heard several conversations similar to the one between my husband and me.  “Very intense…men’s anger, frustration juxtaposed to a woman’s calming efforts… ultimately surrendering "

Thanks for the opportunity to experience something very different in dance. - Mary

This is the kind of event I really count on OtB to bring us from time to time: A rare opportunity to see a troupe from halfway across the globe – and, if you’re there on the right night, to meet them before or after the show and ask questions about their work.

I have long been fascinated with African culture, though I always wish I knew more about it. I’ve seen many theatre pieces from South Africa during times that I’ve spent in London, New York and Boston; but I’ve now lived in Seattle for almost eight years and realize how few of these shows reach us here. What always impresses me about black South Africans – both before and after the fall of apartheid – is their poignant ability to mix sorrow with joy, anger with resilience, tragedy with activism, and music with all of it.

Boyzie Cekwana, from what I’ve read, came of age artistically in the post-apartheid society; and so his creative urges are different from those which led previous generations of South African artists to live in exile or to stay and create art that spoke out against an oppressive government. In an interview quoted in the OtB program, he shies away from the notion that he creates activist art. But having seen the work of the Market Theatre – a racially integrated, political theatre company in Johannesburg (which the Afrikaner government amazingly allowed not only to perform there, but even to tour the world) – I saw many of the same elements tonight. Cekwana’s Floating Outfit Project doesn’t have to rail against the same oppression, and so he can afford to be more polite about it; but he does have a sense of history (most prominent in the second piece on the bill, “Ja’nee”) and he knows there is still a lot to cry about in South Africa.

The structure of “Ja’nee” – the more significant of the evening’s two pieces – is very loose and non-linear. Coupled with songs and monologues in a foreign language, it took me a while to get a handle on what was unfolding. A story is being told, of course; at different times it comes out through diverse elements of dance, of theatre, certainly music, and even images projected on screens or hung in photographs on a clothesline. But even if it's loose around the edges, Cekwana strings some dazzling sequences together at its heart.

What we see, as the curtain rises, is an abstract glimpse of life in the dormitory townships of mine workers. A man watches TV in one corner of the stage; across the way, two others hang out over cigarettes; another lies sleeping. All the while, a low moan of singing weaves these street scenes together. Suddenly one man takes stage with a torrent of shouting, strutting, and the sharp baton-twirling of his stick. Breathlessly, he rants on and on. He seems to be angry; the opening-night audience was relieved to learn in the Q&A afterwards that he is actually declaiming his proud ancestry – a common way for men to puff out their chests for the ladies.

This is still an old-fashioned, male-dominated society we are seeing – men working the mines are only allowed to go home and see their wives once a year – but there is one lady present, at least in Cekwana’s company. Sexy but standoffish, she roams around them as though she were in a parellel universe. Even as the men gather centerstage for a sort of break-dancing exhibition, she is there, tiptoeing around them, a very literal representation of women’s slowly increasing place in their world. She could be a continuation of the slow-motion butoh character the same dancer played in the opening piece, “Rona”. But then, the men retreat upstage; and left alone at last, she bursts into her moment, gracefully swooping and gliding along in front of them.

Another undercurrent of “Ja’nee” is the misery of mine work itself; we don’t see this literally, but it’s represented by gumboots, those tall rubber Wellingtons all mineworkers wear (some even hand-paint theirs in a colorful act of individualism). Once again, the men ward off misery with music; in another core section of the piece, four of them launch into a toe-tapping, hand-clapping, rousing dance that can only be described as tap dancing in work boots. It’s pure delight, even as it illustrates that blend of old world and new, of tribal and modern, that so fascinates Cekwana. As we keep seeing these kinds of crossovers, I kept coming back to one thought: There isn’t a single dance trick you can see on a New York street – no rapper, break-dancer, or hip-hopper’s best moves, surrounded by that ever-present circle of tourists – which didn’t happen in Africa first.

Go check it out this weekend. Who knows when you’ll have another chance to connect with a faraway culture so authentically. Bravo, Lane and Sarah, for bringing Boyzie Cekwana to Seattle.