This summer, Berlin’s Volksbühne presented The Visitors, a new work by the choreographer Constanza Macras. The piece brings together Berlin-based dance company Dorky Park and young South African dancers from the Windybrow Arts Centre and social projects of the Hillbrow district, Johannesburg. Using B-Horror film aesthetics as the connecting tissue, The Visitors ties together scenes of everyday life in apartheid, crime and poverty in the urban landscape, and bureaucratic dysfunction based on the lived experiences of the Hillbrowers.
Ponte City. Photo credit: Geoffrey Hancock.
The performance opened with two children telling a symbolic representation of apartheid history in a ghost story about a haunted childhood house. One day, the unknowable yet threatening “Others” occupied half of the house, leaving the brother and sister living under constant fear in their own quarter. The production’s name, The Visitors, apparently refers to these uninvited ghosts, monsters, and nightmares that haunt the living. The introduction set the stage as a haunted place, stretched out in the liminal zone between the living and the dead, the reality, and the nightmares. Next, the audience was transported to the iconic Ponte City apartment building in Hillbrow represented by a comically huge yet flimsy textile cylinder suspended in the air. Ponte City was designed as a high-end residential building with retail stores and an indoor ski slope but was abandoned in the 1990s after the crime rate roared in the area and gangsters moved into the building. Today, it houses lower-income residents, the majority being black and immigrants. When the dancers consisting of young people and children crawled out from beneath the “Ponte City” and filled up the stage, the audience felt the punch of the overcrowded life of the residents with a palpable sense of chaos and buzz. In the following sequence, the dancers acted out scenes of poverty and crime in the inner-city through parodies of the slasher film tropes. A gang fight, for example, was embodied through mimicry of the zombie apocalypse, where undead men fall to the ground and rise again to resume the fight, dragging the violence on in repetitions. One such sequence recreated the classic plot in which a serial killer stalked a blonde. The dancers dressed up as three pairs of identical blondes and killer-stalkers ran in a maze of moving mirrors. In this house of mirrors, the blondes and the killers chased each other at random, seemingly stuck in an endless loop of meaningless violence, where one could no longer keep track of the positions of perpetration and victimhood.
Ponte City (Screenshot from the teaser. Video credit: Manuel Osterholt).
The production made a self-explanation of its B Horror form. A visually non-binary dancer recounted their experience of studying dance in Germany. According to them, the class did not dance as much, but everyone talked a lot about Deleuze, which depressed them. Unable to get a job in the proper dance scene after graduation, the dancer by chance became a choreographer for B Horror films. The body horror, spasms, and contortions became the choreographer’s language, one that was most capable of expressing their lived reality. This reminds me of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, which similarly relies on extreme physical forms that are viscerally unsettling and sensually reverberant to reveal the truth of the cosmic cruelty that underlies everyday reality. Such cruelty does not simply refer to death or “blood,” but the condition that “[w]e are not free and the sky can still fall on our heads.” The Visitors physically expressed this deprivation of freedom and the right to live in a historical context, articulating the forces of colonialism, capitalism, among other institutions of violence in the everyday lives of Hillbrow through B Horror cruelty. Mimicking zombies, monsters, serial killers, and ghosts, the dancers transformed the stage into a liminal zone where the divide between life and death, or between liveness and deadness, became blurred and indifferentiable. The eerie performance revealed the reification and thingification of the underclass people of post-apartheid Hillbrow in the dual bonds of the colonial-neoliberal apparatus that negates their lives. Acting as walking deads on stage, the dancers represented exhausted lives animated by an invisible yet inescapable power, forced to walk in circles in a hopeless world.
Parody of slasher film tropes (Screenshot from the teaser. Video credit: Manuel Osterholt).
The Vistors is not necessarily groundbreaking in using depersonalized, grotesque, and mechanical forms of acting to represent dehumanization. Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death, for example, has actors imitating the bumpy, mechanical movement of puppets to portray lives petrified by trauma. However, The Vistors does not stop here. The dancers’ seemingly mechanical imitation of un-human, soulless monsters did not amount to a cliché repetition of these tropes. Rather, it showed a citation of these stereotypes mediated by critical reflections and playful humor. The dancers’ parodies of the uncanny killers, monsters and zombies—often driving these tropes to absurdity through comedic exaggeration and repetition—not only acted as social commentaries on the issues of systemic violence, poverty and trauma, but also implied that horror is something artificial and laughable, like a cheap slasher film. Such self-conscious interventions recontextualized the choreography into an ongoing negotiation between the contesting forces of death and life, through which the persons’ will to live and wisdom of living prevailed. Rather than a story of dehumanization, The Vistors gradually revealed the story about the survival and strength of a community that is still capable of imagining a future in a seemingly apocalyptic place.
In the city hall. (Screenshot from the teaser. Video credit: Manuel Osterholt).
The fashion show (Screenshot from the teaser. Video credit: Manuel Osterholt).
The more the performance gradually unfolded, the more the dancers’ liveliness emanated through the grotesque choreography, transforming the stage into a wrestling ground between life and death. The set and costume designs did a wonderful job of structuring this tension between deathness and lifeness. The set design was cold and distancing: a haunted apocalyptic urbanscape that gave off the vibes of “liminal space” and “weirdcore” aesthetics. The costume design was warm: playful, colorful, and often queer-coded. Meanwhile, the performers shifted the air in the theatre back and forth between horror/despair and joy/vigor through their myriad alterations of gestures, tempo, and sound. In one scene, dancers collapsed into convulsions and spasms in the Kafkaesque city hall. In the next scene, they got up from the floor with a beat switch and started striding down the runway in an impromptu fashion show. Wearing extravagant self-made clothes, the dancers held their heads high while a voice-over introduced the short biographies of these residents of Hillbrow. In moments like this, the production did the fantastic thing of affirming life and negating the representations of negations. The fashion show concluded with a sharp shriek that could be a cry or laughter, reminding me that the resistance and survival of the subaltern are always, at best, bittersweet.
The battle dance (Screenshot from the teaser. Video credit: Manuel Osterholt).
Towards the end of the play, a performer commented that the zombie apocalypse trope has an inherently colonial logic for it relies on a Robinson Crusoe fantasy: a (white) man conquers “uncivilized” landscapes and subjugates the “barbarian.” According to this worldview, the residents of Hillbrow could only occupy the role of the zombies. The dancers proceeded to parody a scene of zombies mindlessly killing each other which also resembled the stereotypical representations of Stone Age barbarians. Employing the techniques of exaggeration and repetition to the extreme, the dancers stretched this scene of humans killing each other mindlessly on repeat to an unbearable length, wearing the audience down to boredom, irritation, and the abject feeling of being stuck in a hopeless loop of horror. Just as the audience were wondering if we’d ever get out of this dead-end, the zombie massacre gradually devolved into a battle dance, reverting a stage dominated by lifelessness to one dominated by life. The audience, washed over by the relief of being released from the previous impasse and electrified by the beat, started shuffling their feet and moving their bodies to the rhythm. The kinaesthetic power of the dance moved the audience not just emotionally, but literally “moved” them – to shift their positions, to make movements, to do something. In this final gesture, the dancers negated the B-Horror of their social realities and embodied forth a utopic future. The slasher film gave way to a world of hope and life that has no representational trope but was felt and remembered.
The Visitors
Choreography: Regie Constanza Macras
Costume design: Roman Handt
Stage design: Noluthando Lobese
Created by and with: Alexandra Bodí, Brandon Mangangelele, Bongani Mangena, Emil Bordás, Jackson Mogotlane, Jhon Mbuso Sithole, Jubleen Msusa, Miki Shoji, Mncedesi Mlungisi Lloyd Pududu, Mongezi Siphiwo Mahlobo, Michelle Owami Ndlovu, Nontobeko Portia Ngubane, Privilege Siyabonga Ndhlovu, Sandiso (Zulu) Mbatha, Shantel Ayanda Mnguni, Thulani Lord Mgidi, Tshepang Lebelo, Temosho Evginea Dolo, Thando Ndlovu, Ukho Somadlaka, Vusi Magoro
Video and photo credit: © Manuel Osterholt
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Yizhou Zhang.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
