I'm less than up-to-date about Gregory Maqoma's artistic partners in "Beautiful Me," the solo(-and-musicians) piece up at REDCAT through a Sunday matinee. I'm only very slightly more up-to-date on South African politics, but, in a manner deft and pleasant, Maqoma's piece converts these facts into tools for relating to and educating his audience.
The Thursday audience nearly became part of the performance. Maqoma's hummingbird-quick hands, dexterous footwork, and eloquent clicks and poetics drew sighs, whoops, clapping, and laughter in turn from one of the most apparently wide-ranging assemblies I've seen at the venue.
I don't read autobiographies, I am wary of one-man-shows and, but for the brilliant quartet of musicians upstage right, Maqoma's is a little of each. There are those vast lulls of generally-lit stage meandering (self-indulgent, I think) that make my eyes and my mind wander far from the stage - beware, all ye who are easily distracted. However, Maqoma stays commendably engaging by picking apart his own work as it's being performed.
This is not new. I recall (thank you, Professor Mason) a meta moment of Bugs Bunny drawing himself out of a cartoon. Maqoma's extracts the bare bones from the work he has done with Akram Khan, Faustin Linyekula, and Vincent Mantsoe. (I link because I care; also, because I have a lot to learn.) A new skeleton of artistic theory is built on the stage, fleshed out with Maqoma's identity as a South African and as that ubiquitously unique thing, an (thank you, Professor Lentz) individual mind. Ta-dam! New art, his but also not his, representative without simplifying.
I am especially pleased with the role of the incredible quartet Maqoma is bringing on tour. They make his hands flutter - or do his fluttering hands speed the drumming? It is this give and take, the two often indiscernible, that bring about the signature and, I think, best qualities of music and dance that are often lost (or, at best, only vaguely recalled) in dance outside of the African continent.
Without the past, "how do we know where we come from? How do we confront ourselves? Each other?... The past is not dead!" (The audience swoons.) The process Maqoma allows us to see and the product it makes create an almost-workshop, albeit in its late phases, between creator and viewer. He does not evade my autobiography miffs, but Maqoma presents an impressive array of what he has made, and how others have made him - an idea too often forgotten as part of the process, then left out of the performance.
Photo by Steven Gunther
