Unmasking the Mythology of Man
Superheroes yearn for the respite of being merely human; they wear masks so that they can symbolically put on and off the great responsibility of power. For humankind though, the responsibility is daily and it weighs heavily on the body of a man who wakes up every day to try to be the mythical hero that they are expected and hope to be. Hero begins with the dancer (Standard Bank Young Artist for Dance 2013 Fana Tshabalala) cutting through the air with powerful limbs. When the lights come up on the stage this hero’s work has already begun. In South Africa, where people wake up earlier than most peoples of the world to work, this sense of a Sisyphean task that begins before the light of day and continues even after the lights have dimmed is telling. The hero in this dance is contrasted by an anti-hero (performed by Thulani Chauke) who wears the colours of the hero’s garb inversely; Tshabalala’s grey t-shirt is the grey of Chauke’s pants and Tshabalala’s black pants are inverted as Chauke’s t-shirt, of that colour. Chauke enters the stage with a hapless effort, merely walking past the sweating hero who never stops moving. In the Promethean myth of the creation of man Prometheus endows the human body with the physique of the gods- allowing man to stand upright; and the insight of god’s fire. This inadvertently causes man’s and Prometheus’ suffering. The story of mythological males who carry the weight of serving society is one of incredible bravery, sacrifice, torture and (generally) posthumous glory. Chauke stands on a cube with the murals of great men of history- both ancient and contemporary- and he slouches. He is photographed by a flashing light and the sound of the clicks of a camera. The lighting of the show overall was quite unimpressive. The snaps of light for the photography fall behind the placement of the box and the pink light that falls on the box at the end of the show seems without precedence in the previous lighting states. The performance itself plays with a low-fi sense of anti-performativity; even Tshabalala’s exhausting movements interchange with gym-exercises and stretches that would be seen backstage as preparation for the show rather than as part of a performance themselves. The unexciting costuming is also reflective of the kind of clothing that Tshabalala and Chauke wear when they give classes in studio and so puts the dancers themselves on the stage, rather than distinct characters for them to portray. The dance is anti-performative. It is an interesting parallel with the other duet on the male dancing body and its weighty expectations The Last Attitude. In the female-performed duet Nelisiwe Xaba and Mamela Nyamza also create an anti-dance. The anti-ballet exposes the physical effort of the male ballet dancer who is a carrier and a lifter for much of the narrative of their dance. The dance is stripped- the dancers are in male briefs- to reveal the façade of the dancers’ performance as one of leaps and poses requiring the type of physical strength that has been likened to stallions. In Hero, the dancers also take their turns with revealing the male physique as a body of potential power and simultaneous vulnerability as they too take off their clothes and stand in nothing but briefs. Here, the duo presents the possibility of a single man being split into two: the superhero and the superhero’s unmasked identity, the mere man. As the ostensible hero, Tshabalala pours with sweat as his dance has no pause. When he has an opportunity to slow down he only does so to stretch in preparation for the next set of exhaustive lifts of limbs. The pauses are allowed by Chauke’s short spurts of activity. With every set of circles that Chauke makes, walking around the stage loosely, he stops to turn the portrait cube and reveal a fresh face. The images- which started with that of Superman- are of Socrates, Jesus, Nelson Mandela, Michael Jackson, and a body builder. The shoes of greatness are so large it is absurd. And the piece itself takes on this tone of absurdity. Tshabalala eventually flops to the floor like a dying fish waddling about on the sweaty puddles of his own drained body. But he still cannot stop the now painful persistent pace. As he gets up to continue moving he grimaces in silent screams. Chauke catches him at the waist and they become an awkward centaur; not Chiron the wise centaur who helped to free Prometheus from his eternal punishment but a bumbling centaur that does not know how to maintain its connection with its horse-half of its body. The mythology of man is dissected as a separating force that causes a split between hero and man. At the height of the work it is the anti-hero, the ordinary waddling man as performed by Chauke throughout most of the piece, who has to carry the weight of the hero when the hero can no longer stand on his own. Chauke tries to mould the hero back into form but the hero can only hold the sculptural image of its former activity. Like Socrates, who is pictured on the cube with his heavy head resting on his fist in the sculptures created of him after he was executed by the very people he was trying to help, the hero becomes an image. It is then that Chauke has to drag the bundle of man to sit on the cube and he takes Tshabalala’s drenched clothes and puts them on to carry on the dance that Tshabalala had begun. Ordinary man is hero. This would have been a powerful ending. The silence after an incredible composition mixing Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor Largo Ma Non Troppo had both performers vibrating the stage. But the piece ended on the maudlin music of Bonnie Tyler singing, ‘Where have all the good men gone… I need a hero… Hero’!
