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19th April - Tuesday
BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND
Rebirth of an Ostrich at Maitisong
Rebirth of the Ostrich - REVIEW !!!
On thursday night Maitisong was graced by an exceptionally well crafted performance produced and directed by Moratiwa Molema. This inventive staging of a story rooted in the genre of folk tales mixed up the traditional with the contemporary seamlessly. On a purely visual level the attention to detail was brilliantly handled often composing the stage as one would a painting alternating contrasts from one side of the picture to the other through a simple but effective use of light.
So much has been said about the importance of heritage over the past few years with constant references to the rural traditions creating a rather insular vision, what was exciting about this production was the cultural mix and a far more contemporary vision of how to tell a story.
The use of Indian percussion and the sounds of traditional dance shakers mixed with European choral music was innovative. In fact the sound as a whole was an interesting blend of quite antagonistic genres. Moratiwa's use of shadow and projection has reached new heights in this performance; witty and clever it carries the story beautifully at the same time allowing for a dimension of a sort of backstory giving more depth to the narrative. Again the attention to detail was wonderful from the gorging on the ostrich to the montage of the ostrich, a gorgeous mix of shadow and film footage mingled with cleverly observed dance and movement.
If this performance returns to the stage I urge anyone to go and see - you will be delighted.
Steve Jobson
SYNOPSIS: “Running Ostrich”
The multimedia performance that I am preparing is based on a poem in a book by Arthur Markowitz called The Rebirth of the Ostrich (1971). I am aware that controversy has surrounded this book; “and Other Stories of the Kalahari Bushmen Told in Their Own Manner”, has, for example, been called into question in the context of South African race relations of the 1970s and 1980s. But the political economy of apartheid and indigenous-knowledge copyright aside, I found the content of the poem inspiring. Death and rebirth into a new, improved self is a powerful and timeless metaphor in many traditions. I was also inspired by the Botswana basket pattern called Running Ostrich, and consequently realized that the patterns woven into Botswana baskets have names and sometimes stories to tell. I have sought to make these two sources, poem and basket, a component of my own sense of a contemporary culture and aesthetic by combining them with the music of traditional Tswana instruments, jazz saxophone, baroque music sung by a choir, classical strings, Indian drums, and experimental visuals and sounds, all of them meant to reflect these very times we are living in. The artistic language that I am developing expresses my own identities, and, perhaps, the identities of the nation and of the region at large.
