Memories Against Forgetting
BY LLIANE LOOTS (JOMBA! CONTEMPORARY DANCE EXPERIENCE: ARTISTIC DIRECTOR)
Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre, 23 August 2017
Alice Walker, the African-American womanist poet writes:
“To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps, to God; or the Gods. We remember our ancestors because it is easy thing to forget; we remember them to remind ourselves that we are not the first to suffer, to rebel, to fight, to dance, to love or, indeed, to die. Our ancestors remind us of the grace needed to embrace life, they remind us to embrace life in spite of the pain, the sorrow; and finally they remind us that our remembrance of them is a measure of our understanding of what has gone before”
Ours is a country consumed by memories of what has gone before. It is — and has been for the past 20 years or so — a country in which we have walked with our history day by day and moment by moment. This has been, what Alice Walker refers to as the grace, of us as South African and as Africans forging ahead in the grand tradition of progress.
However, it is also a country that has recently begun to shift and change with what I am beginning to describe as “the politics of memory”. In our desire to correctly re-write racist, colonial and exclusionary histories, the fervour to re-tell and re-write our nations stories, has also had the synergistic effect of leading us to a place where history and memory are being eroded and vanquished.
In the lure of developmental progress and the commodification and corporatisation of ourselves, our learning space and our art spaces, we no longer encounter the layerings of history and memory, of acknowledging artists and activists who have built the bridges we stand on.
Instead we are told to “brand ourselves” and to imagine ourselves — as artists, academics, activists, workers — as inventing the new. We have entered a time in our own political landscape where things are falling apart not because of a struggle or a political imperative, but because of a dedicated (and often rewarded) loss of memory.
It is so much easier to shut things down, to close artist spaces when you plead ignorance to history and when you have no memory. We have endless revolving leadership, we have interim leadership, we have, for example, minsters who are moved around our nation like pawns on a chess board — our Minister of Police becomes our Minister of Arts and Culture, our Minster of Sports becomes oir Minister of Police … and in all of this, we have begun to see the effects of this as a loss of memory, a loss of institutional memory, a loss of political memory and artistic memory.
Every new appointee (usually interim) arrives and starts again and again as we use the phrase, “a clean slate” like it is a solution to the horror of a political landscape of increased poverty.
The important desire after 1994, of Kathrada and Mandela’s legacy to re-writing racist and oppressive histories in our country, have been forgotten as we have begun to embrace the endless political slippery slope of ‘clean slates’ and the idea of beginning again and again and again.
We are urged simply not to care about what has gone before — we obliterate memory and thus are freed up to behave in a manner that avoids consequences — our allegiances are only to the developed imagined branded future and not to the memory of the historical struggles of the past.
Czechoslovakian writer, Milan Kundera describes this struggle of humanity against power, as the “struggle of memory against forgetting”.
What becomes of us when history is so forgotten that we cannot trust our own memories, what becomes of us when nobody cares anymore? When those in positions of power and authority make decisions about our art spaces, not out of care but out of a simple (and neglectful) forgetting?
We, as Africans, we the first people, we who danced to talk to gods and to ancestors … we have forgotten what it means to collectively and individually dance. Our memories have been colonised by the political jargon of ‘clean slates’, new beginnings, new budgets, new and interim leadership … and we no longer dance any more.
We are right in the middle of our own war in the struggle of memory against forgetting. I too am left wondering how to fight against institutional and artistic neglect that is the most dangerous by-product of this sanctioned “forgetting”.
Alice Walker’s words urge us to avoid this memory loss. Her words remind us that we are not the first nation to suffer, and nor are we done living through violence and, more pointedly, neglect. Her words remind us that it is the act of remembering that teaches us grace. Herein lies the value of a societies artists — they are that memory that can take hold of history, of sadness, of love and be the voices that are the struggle of memory against the neglect of forgetting.
And so it is that I, on behalf of the Centre for Creative Arts, our School of the Arts and our beloved Faculty of Humanities, and the University of KwaZulu-Natal, take great pleasure in welcoming all of you to the opening of this year’s 19th edition of the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience — a place of memory. For this is the work of the contemporary dancer, the choreographer and the arts administrator — to makes space for this war against cellular forgetting.
This festival makes a dedicated effort to invite and partner with organisations, artists and dance companies who are using the voice of their physical dance art, to break down stereotypes, to address embodied histories and memory, who physically deconstruct socially and culturally defined ways of being inside one’s skin. There are no ‘clean slates’ in contemporary dance, only the fascination of the historically layered stratification of body politics.
We open tonight’s festival with an historical collaboration between two continents and two choreographers; South Africa’s Gregory Maqoma and Germany’s Helge Letonja in a work that echoes Shakespeare’s “time is out of joint”.
We welcome to the festival, two of South Africa’s most prestigious female dance makers. First is the Standard Bank Young Artist for Dance, Thandazile Sonia Radebe. Radebe’s work holds no prisoners as she evocatively asks us to remember our humanity. And we welcome South Africa’s most feisty and controversial dance maker Mamela Nymaza who holds no punches in her gendered re-remembering of women’s stories.
We welcome our beautiful brother Marcel Gbeffa from the West African country of Benin. What an intense pleasure to share this JOMBA! platform with our continental dancing family and for us to make space for stories that honour our own continent’s memories.
We welcome, on their third visit to JOMBA!, the Dutch company INTRODANS, who once again have funded their own way to our festival and who, in a spirit of meetings and partnerships, continue to keep our festival, our university and our city on their touring agenda. I am humbled again and again, by the enormous generosity of this Arnhem-based company.
And in a unique partnership, INTRODANS have partnered with Durban’s FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY in an integrated dance project that culminates in a performance called CARDIAC OUTPUT on Sunday the 3rd September. Choreographer Adriaan Luteijn has worked alongside 4 Durban dancers with Down Syndrome in a pairing with FLATFOOT in a dance encounter that is unprecedented in this country. JOMBA!’s vision to open the doors of art, culture and dance to all — to decolonise the ownership of art and culture — can find no better fulfilment than in this programme that honours intellectual and physical differences.
We have our usual JOMBA! FRINGE and YOUTH FRINGE platforms, both of which continue to grow new generations of rebellious art making dancing bodies.
All visiting dancers, companies and choreographers participate in our extensive JOMBA! workshop and dance dialogue programme that sees free workshops on offer and various community classes and programmes being run through-out eThekwini and that sits alongside the 12 days of performances.
I stand here tonight also on behalf of a whole team of amazing individuals from UKZN’s Centre for Creative Arts. I acknowledge you all for the grace of hours of work done to make space for artists to show their work at this festival. We have gone through a few tough times together but I wanted to publically express my deep love and admiration for you all — there is no higher work than offering service to support the dancing memory holders that are the artists at this festival — I love you guys!
I honour our major funding partner in the form of the eThekwini Metro Parks, Recreation and Culture.
I honour and welcome our beloved UKZN School of the Arts Dean, Prof. Nobuhle Hlongwa
I thank Vincent and the Alliance Francaise (Durban) and the Institut Francaise of South Africa for the partnership in bringing Benin’s Marcel Gbeffa to Durban and to JOMBA!
I honour, too,
· Wesley Maherry and the JOMBA! technical crew for being around to hold our dance work so carefully,
· The Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre,
· Val Adamson for being our eyes as she takes images of our bodies in motions,
· Sharlene Versveld and Nolwazi Magwaza or being publicists who understand kindness and ethics
· The KZNSA Art Gallery and the venue partnership they have offered us not just for this festival but on-goingly,
· I thank Adrienne Sichel and Clare Craighead for running our JOMBA! UKZN graduate dance writing residency (with students from both PMB and Howard campus) and for producing our JOMBA! Khuluma newspaper
And finally, in this spirit of understanding what has gone before; that fight against forgetting, I want to end with a small little moment shared with me recent by a guest to UKZN, Carla Maxwell. Many of you know that Carla, now well over 70, danced with the Mexican American modern dance pioneer Jose Limón. Limón, himself an immigrant into the US in the early 20th Century and a victim of intense racism, went on to define an epoch of dance making in America.
The story goes that towards the end of his life (around 1949), at a time of an intense funding crisis, limited studio and rehearsal space, blocked toilets, walls peeling with old paint, and on this particular day, no water in the building, … one of the dancers in Limón’s company stopped the rehearsals and asked him why they should even bother to continue working and dancing because it was very clear that nobody cared.
Limón’s answer was clear and he said “that while truth is under threat, while justice seems not to prevail, while politicians continue to forget that their job is to serve, and while democracy is still not safe, it is the job of the dancer to continue to move in a way that asks more of humanity”.
Welcome to JOMBA! 2017
