A Black female body walks into a white space…
By Thobile Maphanga (Guest Writer)
One of Four, conceptualised, choreographed and performed by Nomfundo Hlongwa, is a short dance film that reveals a common narrative of otheredness. This subject, handled in stark images that push on the edges of subversion, literally flips the screen to show the underside of silencing felt by black female bodies in the dance world. As the title suggests, choreographer Hlongwa confirms that this is only one story of Black women’s oppression in spaces not made for, or welcoming to them. Her story. She explains that this investigation “came from a personal journey that I’ve experienced. I think most of the time, in my career, and as I am still growing, there’s always been something about my body, or something about my body not being suited for this space or viewed as something else”.
The location is a clinically pristine dance studio, a white box as opposed to the more commonly known black box of a theatre. A Black female body enters the space, mop and bucket in hand, and I am immediately reminded of South African artist Mary Sibande’s many incarnations of her alter ego, Sophie. Unlike Sibande’s boldly clad domestic goddess, Hlongwa is dressed in monochromatic grey and white. The monotony of the soundscape forms a dystopian atmosphere and after one panning stare that fixes on the camera, her body collapses under the weight of expectation, gaze and degradation, knocking over and spilling the clear liquid contents of the bucket.
Hlongwa mentions how her creative process was geared at “interrogat[ing] body politics through challenging the deep rooted toxicity of the patriarch”. Her Black body reveals the familiar feeling of exhaustion that many years of being made to feel inferior, unworthy, sexualised and constantly being put down bring. Her silent screams and tension induced writhing as she mops the floor with her body speak to an undeniable silencing on all levels.
She remarks in a short telephone interview that “there are so many things that we could be fighting about. But why as a woman, as an artist, do I still have to fight about how I am treated, my voice being heard, all of these things. There are so many important things, we shouldn’t be fighting about these”.
Her experiences working in various male-led dance companies as a curvaceous Black woman, she reveals, left her unaware of how she had internalised this silencing until a fellow female dancer of colour spotted it which encouraged her to begin to think about flipping the script. We see the first crack of joy as she returns to the barre. She confronts the camera in glee as she moves unlike a ballerina, undulating from the hips and “moving the way [she] want[s] to” in a connected, unisolated moment that says “here I am”.
As she strips off the many years of others’ abjectly messy judgements and disgards of the clear filth that no longer serves her, I am left with a hopeful air. An optimism that one more young Black female voice has broken loose from the double-edged sword of a racially charged patriarchal trap of silent injustice.
Born in the honeymoon phase of 1994 democracy, this is Nomfundo Hlongwa’s second solo independent work. One of Four interrogates her own voice in her spaces of work. This starkly still yet loaded short dance film, which is inspired by a previous collaboration with three other women entitled Four, raises questions of how long it takes to become free.
