A second year University of Cape Town drama student,
Maninzi Kwatshube, brought a moving piece of theatre to the Savanna Trust
hosted festival, Protest Arts International Festival (PAIF). This is the fourth
edition of the festival and it ran under the theme ‘Imagining and Re-Inventing
the Future’. When Maninzi heard about PAIF, she thought there was no better
opportunity to protest against African notions of beauty.
Maninzi collaborated with Nkule Mabaso, a fellow UCT
Fine art student, who made the braids (which Maninzi used as part of the props)
for her BA project. Maninzi took it upon herself to create a performance using
the material that Mabaso had provided. Maninzi played Rapunzel, a character who
represents Nkule Mabaso. Rapunzel is trapped in a desolate and unforgiving
environment. She explores the female experience of the city, negotiating the
fragile balance of fear and survival, of wanting to be desired and the fear of
being desirable.
Zimbabwean
audiences are ‘haunted’ by the ghost of previous performances at Theatre in the
Park. All performances that come to this venue, with a few possible exceptions,
use dialogue together with other performance forms such as dance, mime and
song. On 27 October 2012, Zimbabwean audiences brought with them the residue
memory of those previous performances, which they obviously wanted to use to
appreciate a new performance coming from South Africa, Black Threat.
However, they had a rude awakening when they were confronted by a performance
that began and ended without a single word spoken. Maninzi, playing Rapunzel,
never mimed, danced or sang. She chose to be a slave to the properties that
adorned the set.
Black
Threat
proposed new distinctive conventions, that is rules imposed by the performance
itself and hence unknown to the audience. The beauty of distinctive conventions
is that they add a new experiential memory for future use. In this new theatre,
at least to Zimbabwe, it is no longer the story/plot/action, but the ‘game’
that becomes the generative matrix. In Black Threat, the game involves
applying makeup, wearing a wig of braids and playing with it till it infuriates
Rapunzel. The audience left with a number of questions. What was it they had
just seen? Was it theatre or not? What kind of theatre? Can theatre take place
without recourse to the spoken word?
In
the performance Rapunzel’s hair represents all the repressive elements that
hinder her femininity on the one hand and on the other hand, the hair functions as the
gross bodily extension that is meant to increase her attractiveness. The hair
also functions as a tower of conceit and self-hatred from which she must escape
as her hair keeps her imprisoned in a cycle of self-hatred and ill-confidence.
When
the audience got into the venue, the performance had already begun, contrary to
tradition where a performance begins after the audience has settled. Rapunzel,
played by Maninzi was sitting on an African reed mat applying makeup on her
lips, eyes, face, body and legs. Faint warmers illuminated this figure in the centre
of a theatre in the round.
The
door leading to the set was made of plaited braids. Each member of the audience
touched these braids as they entered the space, giving the braids a ritualistic
significance quite unsettling for religious audiences. The braids extended to
the ground and wound around an opened makeup box revealing all the
paraphernalia, from which Maninzi occasionally drew more makeup.
There
was a pre-recorded audio playing from a computer which was visible on set and
operated by a person visible to the audience. It was a chat between Nkule and
Nkanyisile which was recorded in one of the University of Cape Town residences.
They were talking about African and Coloured identities as they were defined in
the 1950 Population Registration Act. What came out was the segregation amongst
Coloured communities. The standard preferred identity was the Coloured with
straight long hair typical of population groups with Malay blood. Coloureds
with black parents were ‘othered’ in both Coloured and Black communities. Nkule
and Nkanyisile laughed, cried, complained, despaired and celebrated in the
background. No visuals were used.
While
the audio chat was going on, Maninzi pursued action of a different type, not
based on satisfying a want, but playing a game with braids and pants hung on
the line. When her figure was fully illuminated, she set facing the entrance
and applying more makeup. She knelt down, head on the ground, in what seemed
like a prayerful gesture and began to worship the braids. She did it a few more
times and ended the routine with a burst of energy which loosened a loop and
released the braids from the door.
The
rest of the performance centres around Rapunzel fashioning The Black Threat
(title of the mass of artificial dreadlocks) into a dress that she climbs into
and lounge around in, and admires her beauty and desirability until she
realizes that is she is trapped and needs to escape but there is no escape, and
so she exhausts herself fighting the towering dress she has built until she is
free but only to start all over again in different spaces that represent
different ills. The things that make a city more familiar and less alien are
not the concrete or other physical markers, but the relationships and the
people and the associations we make with that place.
It
was an excruciating experience where an object of adornment turned into an
object of horror and torture. A member of the audience sitting just above me
couldn’t hide his exasperation and shouted ‘women are in trouble!’ I felt the
urge to stand up and relieve her of the weight she was carrying, but remembered
it was a performance. At that moment, another shocking experience happened.
Maninzi decided to take off the cloth wound around her body. This revealed her
whole body with only a brown tight pant covering the essentials. This was quite
unsettling for a conservative Zimbabwean audience. The closest, a performer
came to nudity was when Tinopona Katsande took off her g-string and threw it on
the floor as she maintained her position inside the blankets, while playing in
Noel Marerwa’s Hot Water Bottle. Maninzi dressed up in pink bra and
pants in full view of the audience. She put on a leopard skin coloured trousers
and matching high heeled shoes. She started modelling in this costume nearly
falling on several occasions. She seemed to attack all symbols of African
feminine beauty. Hair and its connection to attractiveness plays a large part
of how black women project themselves out to the world and into the future. The
underlying implications of the fake hairs that they adorn and the unconscious
or conscious desire to resemble white women in order to be seen as attractive
and socially acceptable is problematised.
Maninzi
finally decided to put on a matching top, but with each attempt, the long
braids prevented her from wearing what she wanted to. She tried several times
and realising the futility of the exercise, she started stripping again
violently. She turned the makeup box upside down scattering its contents all
over the set. She removed the braids and threw them in a heap together with the
high heeled shoes. She wound a cloth with ethnic colours around her head
leaving the top part revealing her trimmed African hair. The blouse could now
fit her body. The audience sensed the end and clapped hands bringing closure to
the show.
The
idea was to refocus on the ‘traditional’ ideas of beauty and its construction;
how black women define their attractiveness through foreign standards which
effectively ‘other’ them. Was this theatre, the audience wondered? Mabaso
calls her piece ‘contemporary performance’, while others call it ‘live art’ or
‘performance art’. Theatre of a physical nature has been taken as ‘contemporary
dance’ and relegated to dance spaces such as 7 Arts in Avondale. This has
limited its scope of penetration in Zimbabwe. Lloyd Nyikadzino is now involved
in various workshops to train Zimbabwean theatre makers in the art of physical
theatre. Stanley Mambo, through Conquered Plans has attempted to
mainstream physical theatre. Ravengai has already directed Tirivangani
and is currently deconstructing Magwa’s Njuzu [Merman] to create theatre
of a physical nature. Maninzi’s Black Threat has introduced a new creative
vibe that could see Zimbabwean theatre moving into a fundamentally new
direction.
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