Bodies in Light: highlights from the 5th Infecting the City Public Arts Festival

One of Victorine Muller's Bodies in Light sculptural performances

The 2012 Cape Town based Infecting the City Public Arts Festival has come and gone and all we are left with are memories and archives. Overall, bad memories - memories that one might do well to forget. In its 5th year the festival had a lot on offer and visitors were treated to free entertainment by some of the most well-known artists (dancers, fine artists, actors, musicians, performance artists, etc) over the 6th - 10th of March at various venues or spots throughout the city. To be sure, some of the performaces were captivating, even if not great, but most of them were just not good enough even though it was clear that the majority of the festival goers seemed to think otherwise. Thankfully with the passing years  and with the growing trust in my own aesthetic responses, I've grown less and less inclined to kowtow to hype, celebrity or majoritarianism when evaluating art. To me, a lot of people took the performances at the 6th Infecting the City festival very seriously, yet on closer scrutiny few performances deserved that much attention. What this festival brought to the fore, for me, was the general decline in standards, not only in the aesthetics of performance but also in judgement. Judicious discrimination of the performances on offer by the attending audiences was lacking, and both these downward spirals (in performance and judgement) were made possible and veiled by the artists' own unbearable sense of self-importance and self-promotion as well as the audiences' fear of appearing silly and dumb and facing ostracisation from the fringe herd for failing to enthusiastically receive these senseless or simply silly spectacles by the oh-so-out-there artists. 

The brew was perfect for what it was not intended to be: a comical farce of pretensions masquerading as revolutionary art and artistic integrity on the part of the artists and deep artistic appreciation on the part of the audiences, where very little of either was visible or warranted. After one incredibly silly performance ('radical' because of its excessive use of the pissing-on-the-sacred variety of shock), I remember asking another artistically inclined acquaintance  what he thought of it and him responding hesitantly, 'There is a lot to think about there,' and I thinking to myself, 'Not really, no.' But I decided to be move closer to neutral and simply said 'Well, don't get constipated over it.' 

I shall not be specific about the performances I hated - as it should be obvious by now there were far too many; the festival opened with a bad bang (Dada Masilo's Death of the Maidens - incredible dancers though) and closed with an even worse bang (Julia Rayham's Phylum and Phoenix - about which I have absolutely nothing positive to say), and in between was glut so ridiculous (Athi Patra-Ruga's Ilulwane being the prime example) I kept being grateful I didn't have to pay anything for being subjected to this besides lost time. Writing a full piece about the bad state of affairs will take me forever and in the end it will not be worth the effort. Instead I shall focus on the pieces I liked, elucidating why I liked them best. One I liked the most was one that I thought was greatly misunderstood and highly under-appreciated all round: Victorine Müller Bodies in Light sculpture performances that happened every evening during the festival. Ole Hamre's Capeofon was  another brilliant respite from all the madness and was very popular with festival goers, and Vincent Mantsoe's NTU/// was brilliant despite some challenges posed by the space that prevented a fuller appreciation of the piece.

NTU///... What charge! What emotional energy! As with most pieces at the festival, I cannot claim to know with unchallenged certainty what the piece was about and I won't pretend to do so now, but unlike most pieces on display, this lack of clearly discernible meaning from the panoply of symbolisms was not a bother - the piece was so captivating a performance in and of itself it was simply amazing to watch. This was not the first time Mantsoe performed NTU///. A quick search on the internet makes this clear, and besides, the festival brochure also carried a glowing extract from a review by the New York Times for the same performance.  The man could move, and in those movements was contained a narrative that conveyed struggle, release, regeneration, and at times an emotion akin to total joy, bliss. Despite the steady and increasing breeze at the Company Gardens that had a number of us reaching for our coats and jerseys by the time the performance was over, Mantsoe was a boiling inferno with drips of sweat to prove it. He seemed locked in an embrace of an internal dialogue with a phantom I could not  entirely grasp but could not but wish to understand by unremittingly starring at him converse with it and journeying with it to the climax and decline of the encounter.

This beautiful piece, however, was not served well by the physical (open air) space at which it was staged: this one-man show would have been better served in a closed, more intimate environment, preferably an indoor arena setting, in which the emotional intensity of the piece could be contained by and transmitted amongst the audience members. A space in which all the occasional and attention-grabbing foot stomping would have registered the changes of tempo and the build-up of 'narrative' and change of pace and mood they seemed to signal. A space where the gradual shedding of garments, and later, in exchange for others might have transmitted to us a clearer signal of what stirrings of the body in motion was trying to convey. A space where the meanings behind the very choice of and the details on those garments could have been visible enough for us to take note and analyse and thus add more to the picture that was unfolding beautifully in front us. Also, such an ideal space with its accompanying intimacy might have helped to shield the obvious repetitions that made up the piece, something that was not always easy to ignore (or forgive or accept as a necessary procedure in the conceptualisation of the performance) in the vast open air stage. But then such a space would defeat the point of 'public art', wouldn't it? Maybe then this is something that the future planners of the festival could keep in mind - some pieces just need more intimate public spaces for them to work and more effort in that direction could be made. Nevertheless, despite all these challenges the existence of contemporary dancers like Mantsoe is a comfort that all is not lost, and France (where he is based) is lucky to have him and South Africa should boast to have produced him.

Ole Homre's Capeofon was another pleasant surprise that kept getting better as it progressed, offering the audience delights unforeseen and totally absorbing. The first of such offerings was the presence of Kyle Shepherd, the Cape Town based but internationally acclaimed pianist and all round musical prodigy - he was not listed anywhere in connection to the piece and it was such a pleasure to hear him play  after the long hours of dross spectacle.

[TBC...]