I first made the dance for a physical theatre exam at Rhodes University in October 1999. Then I perform it in the premier dance festival of the Eastern Cape province, the FNB Vita Dance Umdudo.
It was not the first time a project in the drama course landed up at the Dance Umdudo - I performed Your Proximity at the 1999 Umdudo after the HOD saw the term project and recommended it for the festival. In it I recruited 7 people to pour copious amounts of water in clay bowls (made by us) onto my body, which appeared nearly naked in front of the audience (some of whom whistled in -- surprise? indignance? -- when I started taking off my pants), while 2 performers held mobile lamps (parcans) and panned the light shafts on to different parts of my body. The water glared in the light against the pitch black stage, brightly outlining my silhouetted body, while I moved in butoh-like slow motion. It elicited a reviewer's comment of "spectacular" in the student newspaper Activate. After the music ended, I played with the audience and stayed on stage, not ending the piece. It was then that I felt how the audience was captivated, their silent attention tangibly thick.
The warmth I feel was entirely different. Beside spoken texts and gestural work, it is said to be "formalist" - arms and legs, balances and leaps, turns and pointed feet. But still highly charged with emotions, and very personal in nature.
Part of this solo was a series of everyday gestures and actions, like smoking, touching, embracing. But other gestures were harder to pin down: ecstasy, apprehension. The gestures shifted to a symbolic realm, and so the unseen psyche was expressed into visible movements, and the boundaries between the physical and the emotional, the tangible and the fanciful, began to melt.
While water pouring on my body was really chilly, the visual and aural sense of the pseudo-butoh was quite rich and warm (yellow, bright light source, loud music with a hypnotic guitar rhythm). The warmth I feel was set in a glacial ice-cap kind of place, and even though I sweated and panted for air from the demanding movement, it was essentially a cold piece, both visually (white and blue colour-scheme), aurally (silent beside a slight mumbling) and emotionally (a still sadness).
Clad in white Y-front jockeys, and later white pants, a white karate-kimono-type top, with white clothing strewn about the dance mat, and three white door frames, I danced my solo The warmth I feel.
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