The Boston Phoenix
October 29 - November 5, 1998

[Dance Reviews]

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Portable traditions

Soweto Street Beat and the Matthew Bourne Swan Lake

by Marcia B. Siegel

Dance traditions can cross borders as easily as the people who practice them. It's getting hard to know what's meant when a tradition is invoked. English choreographer Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake swerves way off the plot of the 19th-century classic, and it's been considered as a deconstruction, an interpretation, a new aesthetic. But it does use Tchaikovsky's music. and it hinges on the familiar, magical premise of a prince fatally in love with a swan. So is it really a renewal of a tired old ballet? And what about a company of erstwhile street toughs from Soweto who live in Atlanta and, dressed in feathers and pelts, perform versions of Zulu dances that they appear to have made up themselves?

Soweto Street Beat Dance Theatre, which appeared at the Emerson Majestic last weekend, was founded in 1987 to teach youngsters the traditions that fed into South African culture. Educational dance has been a great instrument for creating positive role models in American ghetto neighborhoods, and you can't knock this agenda. But the Street Beat performers have taken themselves out of the poverty and oppressive working conditions of their homeland. So what is the focus of their mission now, and what do they represent?

The company was founded by Peter Ngcobo, a community organizer in Soweto Township, and Isabelle Doll Ngcobo, a ballet-trained Johannesburg native who had danced in commercial shows. The company seems to have emerged as a blend of corporate enterprise and social work. Isabelle Ngcobo developed a technique called combo and choreographed fusion pieces for Street Beat Company that were showcased at sports events, festivals, and theaters. After a tour in 1992, the leaders cultivated some backers in Atlanta who wanted the company to relocate. By 1996, they were featured performers at the Summer Olympics. Now they boast a schedule of school and theater performances, and an impressive list of funders.

You could say Soweto Street Beat has found the perfect formula for surviving in today's politically sensitive, entertainment-obsessed arts climate. In Boston it presented an engaging but problematic mix of uplift, authenticity, and show biz. I was surprised that the performance offered so little that's urban and contemporary -- the dancers' real heritage -- and so much that seemed simplistic, undigested, and overproduced from ancestral sources. Fortunately, we can explore African traditions soon again, when World Music brings the National Ballet of Senegal to Sanders Theatre this Monday (November 2), with its spectacle of West African dances and drumming.

Soweto Street Beat's program opened with a flag ceremony, perhaps a holdover from the Olympics, with anthems from a recorded chorus and orchestra. A "Bushman Dance," bearing little relationship to its program note, took place in a dim red light, behind a scrim with large black-and-white jungle designs projected on it. As a narrator dramatically invoked Mother Africa, four people sat in a semi-circle, shaking rattles. A procession of what might have been ancestor spirits clumped through, leaving two young men with bows and arrows who seemed to be going into trance. One of them stretched out on the ground and trembled while the entire group conjured above him. They finally carried off his limp body.

After this, things got down to dancing business. The Doll Ngcobo/Soweto dance style consisted of a firm stepping from foot to foot in a wide stance, essentially a walking dance, that was often done in place and facing the audience. The step, of course, could be varied with faster tempos, syncopated rhythms, and swinging leg gestures. The dancers could suddenly drop into a squat or a sit, and they punctuated their moves with yells and gestured aggressively with batons. Five men carried most of the dancing responsibilities, with five women making token appearances as decorative partners.

One piece was called "Swazi Ndiamu" ("Stamping Dance"), and one, with shields and short spears, was called "Zulu Warrior," but they both looked a lot like the Gumboot, a subversive dance developed by the oppressed, rubber-booted workers in the South African diamond and gold mines. Keeping up their spirits and their energies with a rude but comradely dialogue, the dancers swaggered, slapped their legs and the tops of their boots, and took up the leader's challenges to top one another's stomping rhythms or vibrate their whole body like a pneumatic drill.

These young men didn't look as if they'd ever shot a wild animal or bushwhacked through the jungle. They were kind of self-conscious being "tribal." But in boots and hard hats, with fanny packs over their costumes, when they were playing on an oil drum with a hide stretched over the top, or stomping and heckling the audience as if we were a gang threatening their turf -- then I believed them.

Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, which is running at New York's Neil Simon Theatre until mid January, opened in London in 1995 and has been breaking box-office records and winning awards ever since. I guess everyone who's interested knows by now that the swans are men and the royal court is updated to somewhere in the recognizably recent Windsor dynasty. The production has inspired many games of critical ring toss, because it's just near enough to the classical text, and just outlandishly far enough away, so that no one can make an authoritative interpretation. Is it a drag show? A morality play about a decadent monarchy? A new standard of aesthetic beauty?

To begin with, this Swan Lake isn't a traditional ballet. Choreographer-director Bourne and the international cast have eclectic backgrounds in contemporary dance, television, and shows, and the choreography isn't restricted to a classical movement idiom. Except for a spoofish entertainment in the first act, no one dances on pointe. This is a crucial departure but I suppose a logical way to present an ensemble of male swans. Pointe work, the provenance of women, always comes off as appropriation or a send-up when men do it, and Bourne doesn't want his corps of swans to be seen solely as a voyeuristic play on sexuality.

The corps, barefoot and wearing white feathered plus fours, do fill the stage in neat group formations, but their movement contradicts the precision and impassivity that identifies traditional ballet swans. Instead, they flap and slash their arms, gesture awkwardly with broken wrists, swoop down with force and even ferocity. Bourne says he was thinking of the aggressive behavior of real swans, and the swans' scenes have a kind of sinister dynamism that at first seems at odds with the story, where the swans were helpless prisoners of an evil magician, waiting to be released by the power of love.

The production keeps revising the traditional scenario while also expecting you to see it against the original conventions. The White Swan, who isn't even named as such in the program, does belong to this flock of angry creatures, but at the end of the ballet they turn on him for trying to remain with the Prince. Swan Lake is usually performed as a tragedy, in which the fairy-tale Prince is trapped between his idealistic, otherworldly love and his luxurious, lazy lifestyle. Bourne's Swan Lake begins in an exaggerated here-and-now. The Prince decides to cash in his pointless life before he meets the Swan, and after that things only get worse.

As in the original story, the same dancer (Will Kemp in the cast I saw) plays the manipulative Black Swan. He appears at the Prince's birthday ball like a cat burglar, skittering in over a balcony, and proceeds to seduce not only the Prince but all the females in the place, including the Prince's nymphomaniac mother. This brazen conquest ignites the Prince's Oedipal fury, which has been smoldering beneath his protocol-blanketed personality for the entire ballet. The plotline falls apart in a menacing csárdás where everyone eyes everyone else jealously, and somehow the Prince's lower-class girlfriend gets shot.

This disastrous Freudian dénouement is only to be expected when an heir to the throne has been programmed to be a good little boy and bullied by a mother who taunts him with her lovers. But there are other, less reasonable new twists to the plot that seem to have been inserted only to supply spectacle and satire. As for the dancing, it's usually overshadowed by the burlesque acting style of the production.

The most interesting part to me was the gender-bending first encounter between the Prince (Scott Ambler) and the White Swan. To a very speedy rendition of the traditional second-act pas de deux music, the two characters discover each other and fall in love. But Bourne abandons the fixed roles of Prince as pursuer and Swan as captured and eventually capitulating quarry. Each man desires and seduces the other; each man lifts and caresses the other. Many choreographers are attempting to remove the sexist implications from ballet partnering, but they usually conclude that male-female equality can be achieved only through violence. In this ingenious pas de deux Matthew Bourne shows another alternative, but one that is doomed from the start. Ultimately both transgressors are destroyed by their own kind.