The Silent Wail of Melisande
Photo by Cuepix/Christiaan Louw

I recently had the pleasure of meeting up with Acty Tang, recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Choreography (South Africa) to talk about his new work, Chaste. Emotions surrounding this work are running high as performers are dealing with highly relevant and personal issues of love and the repressed unconscious. This Butoh-inspired physical theatre work is an iconoclastic interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Acty believes this work is about the awakening of desire that has the potential to conquer the repression of law, patriarchy and religion. Performed by Acty himself, a dancer Sifiso Majola, an actress Heike Gehring and two singers this work is bound to provoke stereotypical renditions of what constitutes dance. The politics of dance has been inherent to Acty’s work since he presented his first butoh-inspired dance work at the Dance Umdudo in 1999. Last year Apology for a Stranger questioned why dancers make work and what audiences desire to see. In this work he apologized for his inability to dance and asked “What is there left to make work about, except the act of making work?”

AmaQueerKwere
Photo by Suzy Bernstein

In terms of content, Acty keeps going back to the theme of love. Thematically it involves politics because he looks at the homoerotic on stage in a country where it is still not acceptable at a very basic level. For him, love and desire are very closely related. In AmaQueerKwere (2005) he explored desire across time and space through Sontag’s notion of the erotic, approaching meaning through the sensual. And in Beloved (2004), even though the title refers to love there is no exact love object in the work. Some of his other works include And the Empty Space of His Shadow (1999), Ndilinde - Wait for me (2004), Apology for a Stranger (2006) and The Silent Wail of Melisande (2006). Thematically, it is about the
politics of LOVE. Acty sees love and justice as very much linked: he believes there will be healing and community love but born through huge amounts of trauma, struggle and injustice.

The Silent Wail of Melisande - Studio Shot
Photo by Chipo Laba

At a very basic level Butoh takes the body out of the social realm (which is filled with trauma and resistance) into the extraordinary and spiritual realm. The white painted body classically used in Butoh also relates to South African Xhosa initiation rituals, where black Xhosa boys paint themselves white and live in the bush to exit as young men. This happy
coincidence is very similar to the original context in that it refers to a making other and a link to the spiritual. It also speaks to a local audience who might not be aware of butoh and immediately transports the work to a spiritual realm.

The Beloved

The Beloved
Photo by Elsabé van Tonder

More about Acty …
http://www.artslink.co.za/dance.htm