Photo: Ilan Godfrey.
Vusi Mdoyi, center, rehearsing this month with the Step Afrika! dance group at the Soweto Theater in Soweto Township in Johannesburg.
And speaking of other cultures, today’s story is from South Africa. It reminds me of how much I loved Miriam Makeba albums in the ’60s. And in the ’80s, a Xhosa-Zulu couple we knew (the husband was attending grad school at Harvard). I also remember young John (age 12 or so) auditioning for a kid show on Boston television with his pitch about ending apartheid. The American Black host doubted kids would be interested. Then there was the tour-de-force play Syringa Tree, Pamela Gien’s heartbreaking one-woman show about South Africa. It’s all coming back to me.
Now John Eligon reports at the New York Times on an intriguing dance story from South Africa.
He begins, “The young boy couldn’t resist the dance moves he saw being performed around him: the rapid foot taps, the ligament-spraining knee twists, the torso shimmies, all coming together in what some might describe as a sort of urban tap dance.
“Growing up in an impoverished Black township near Johannesburg in the 1980s, the boy, Vusi Mdoyi, loved watching his father dance with friends, in a style known as pantsula, in the dirt yards of their staid four-room bungalows. It was a sprinkle of joy in the dark days of apartheid.
“At about 7 years old, Mr. Mdoyi began mimicking the dance form. By 10, he was dancing in school festivals. By 14, he had created his own dance crew with neighborhood friends.
“Now 44, Mr. Mdoyi is a celebrated dancer and choreographer who has helped to achieve what felt unimaginable during apartheid: turning the street art of pantsula into a high art that attracts global praise, and audiences. …
“In 1998, while still a teenager, Mr. Mdoyi took part in workshops and shows put on by a dance company, Step Afrika!, which was co-founded in South Africa by C. Brian Williams, a Howard University graduate who had worked in the region. The company fused African American step dancing with traditional African dance.
“The interest that the American dancers showed in pantsula and other African dances helped to inject a sense of pride that their dances were meaningful, Mr. Mdoyi said. Under the white-led apartheid government, which had lost power only four years earlier, Africans were often made to feel ashamed of their own culture, he said. …
“In part with connections made through Step Afrika!, Mr. Mdoyi made his first overseas trip, to teach a pantsula workshop in Britain in 2001. The next year, he toured internationally with Via Katlehong, a pantsula dance company named after his native township. …
“Mr. Mdoyi’s latest work is in some ways a full circle moment to what originally vaulted his career from South African festivals to stages across the world: He choreographed and danced in a piece performed in Soweto this month, during the 30th anniversary celebration of Step Afrika!
“His new piece, titled, ‘The Tattered Soul of a Worker,’ tells the story of South African migrant workers who were forced to travel from their homes to find jobs, and it offers a critique of a capitalist system that has left the working class struggling.
“The dancers, clad in midcentury formal suits, dance at times with beer crates — it’s common in South Africa to see young people dancing pantsula with beer crates at traffic lights, seeking tips. …
“Black South Africans began to take up tap dancing in the 1960s after seeing it in American films, [Gregory Maqoma, an acclaimed South African dancer and choreographer who has mentored Mr. Mdoyi] said. That eventually evolved into pantsula, which started in townships where Black South Africans were forced to live.
“The apartheid regime largely restricted Black South Africans from freely traveling into cities. That left them with virtually no access to the theaters and studios where dance thrived as an art form. So for many Black South Africans, there was little expectation that dance could be anything more than a social activity. …
“As apartheid restrictions began to loosen in the late 1980s and early 1990s, opportunities increased for Black South Africans to access formal dance training and turn their talents into art.
“For Mr. Mdoyi, his focus on dancing as he grew up kept him away from the violence that consumed many Black communities while the government tried to maintain its fragile grip on power in the dying days of apartheid. Mr. Mdoyi said he connected with a popular street entertainer who danced pantsula and introduced him to the dance scene in nightclubs around Johannesburg. …
“The nightclubs were something of a dance academy for Mr. Mdoyi. He met street dancers from many different neighborhoods, each bringing their own styles, techniques and approaches. …
“Mr. Mdoyi’s dance productions can come across as stage plays, with elaborate costuming, soundtracks and even dialogues that tell a story beyond the dance moves themselves. He plays with genres and moods.
“In a performance called ‘Footnotes,’ Mr. Mdoyi and other dancers lay a soundtrack with typewriters, typing eviction notices. The piece grows angry and frantic as disgusted shouts from tenants boom over loudspeakers. …
“In 1998, Mr. Mdoyi won an award at a national dance festival for the first time, and the festival director connected him with Jackie Semela, who had established the Soweto Dance Theater, a company based in the nation’s largest township. Mr. Semela helped to start Step Afrika!, which in 1994 held its first festival, in Soweto, only months after South Africans elected Nelson Mandela president in the country’s first democratic election.
“Under Mr. Semela’s tutelage, Mr. Mdoyi not only honed his craft as a dancer and found a springboard to perform and choreograph pieces internationally, but he also learned the business side of the profession. He now has two companies dedicated to creating pantsula shows and teaching the dance.”
Read more and see cool videos of the dances at the Times, here.
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