Thinking In & Through the Body | Nhlanhla Mahlangu & Thulani Chauke on The Head & The Load
From 11 to 12 April 2023, composer, director, and choreographer, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, and dancer and choreographer Thulani Chauke, presented the two-day mentorship titled Thinking In and Through the Body. Hosted by SO | The Academy for the Less Good Idea, the workshop saw 13 participants encountering and responding to the approaches, contents and imagery of The Head & The Load.
Thinking In and Through the Body culminated in The Open Moment, a public sharing of the material generated in the mentorship and the processes that it explored.
Foregrounding their artistic practice, as well as collaborative making and doing as acts of research, Mahlangu and Chauke used their roles as performers and their respective engagements with The Head & The Load, to shape the mentorship.
Embodiment and excavation
An invitation to each participant to share their own practice is the first generative moment of the mentorship. Dancers, poets, musicians, writers, theatremakers and more make up the list of participants, and this early act of sharing a fragment of one’s way of working leads to a host of improvisatory moments to be tested and played with over the two days.
Free-flowing explorations using projection and text are also hugely productive. Here, Mahlangu leads participants through an exercise in writing and collective reading in which the research materials from The Head & The Load serve as a provocation towards new ideas and performative moments.
“Where do you feel erased in the body?” Mahlangu asks the room. It is an essential question in that it becomes a way of better locating history – one’s own history and a collective history that has been lost, silenced, erased – in the body.
From here, Mahlangu returns to a free-writing exercise where the writing serves as excavation and the body as the archive, the site for living memory. Participants are tasked with locating a single, resonant word in the body, giving it a movement, giving it a sound, and repeating this as a collective performance.
Working collectively
One of The Head & The Load’s most memorable scenes is the “Wounded Man” dance performed by Thulani Chauke and Gregory Maqoma. It is a choreography of physical and psychological exhaustion in which Chauke, a wounded soldier, wants nothing more than to collapse and die but, propped up by Maqoma, he endures.
On day 2 of the mentorship, Chauke leads the participants through the “Wounded Man” dance, through an exercise in locating degrees of tension in the body, holding, resisting, falling, and recovering. The exercise highlights the importance of communication between performers, and how to communicate intentionally with the body, and ultimately grows into a greater collective moment involving all 13 participants.
In engaging in this collective exercise, how do these emergent themes – holding one another, holding oneself in relation to the collective, not wanting to fall, not wanting to be a burden to others, and enduring out of a sense of duty towards the greater ensemble – find resonance throughout history? And how can they be located in the present? Ultimately, in the broader context of the mentorship, the exercise becomes a poignant reflection on inherited memory and how memory sits in the body.
The Open Moment
The Open Moment is a public showing of the material explored in the two-day mentorship programme, Thinking In and Through the Body, led by Mahlangu and Chauke.
Taking place at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, The Open Moment showcases the material generated in the two-day mentorship and also provides insight into Mahlangu and Chauke’s artistic processes and the strategies they employ when collaborating on and creating new work.
At the close of the first day, Mahlangu left the participants with an instruction to bring “a sentimental object” with them the following day. In the same way that African soldiers returned home from World War 1 with nothing more than a jacket or a bicycle, or perhaps something intangible like the ability to drive a military vehicle or assemble a piece of machinery, these sentimental objects became powerful provocations towards a series of short performances.
In The Open Moment, these vignettes, and their ability to drive and sustain a broader, collective performance, become the main event. Following a brief introduction and overview of the kinds of processes and explorations of the mentorship by Mahlangu, the participants step forward with their dog tags, rulers, headwraps, Legos and more. They grow into a collection of profound performative vignettes, each one a compelling proposal, or an idea towards a greater performance.
Ultimately, the ensemble emerges and takes over, evolving into a cacophony of prose, movement, monologue and chorus work, all of it generated for the first time that morning, embracing the free-spirited engagement with process as performance and vice versa.
Reflections
Reflecting on the two-day mentorship, the participants of Thinking In & Through the Body spoke on the need to embrace intuition, collaboration, and intuition as a performer. Further reflections from participants included the notion of feeling as a point of inquiry, inherited memory, and historical bodies. Watch the participant reflections here or in the below video.
– David Mann
PHOTOGRAPHER | Zivanai Matangi
CREDITS:
MENTORS | Nhlanhla Mahlangu & Thulani Chauke
PARTICIPANTS | Anthony Torres, Jayson Tsebe, Khanyisile Mtshobile, Lehlohonolo Makhelele, Mathapelo Matabane, Muhammed Dawjee, Nompumelelo Bucwa, Nonofo Olekeng, Pertunia Msani, Sami Maseko, Thabang Matlala, Uvile Ximba & Vuyelwa Maluleke
MOMENTEUR FOR THE SO ACADEMY | Athena Mazarakis
This mentorship and The Open Moment are presented with the support of Bank of America Securities and the Ichikowitz Family Foundation. With special thanks to the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative.
Executive produced by THE OFFICE performing arts + film.
The Head & The Load in Johannesburg is a co-production with the Centre d’Art Battat, Montreal.