Infamous Tea & Honey show
Chronicling the complete history of the world’s second-largest continent in just 90 minutes may sound like a tall order, but African Footprint has a creative solution: do it through dance.
Stamping, shuffling and shimmying through the dawn of man to the present day, the musical espouses the spirit of the people and the changes in their mode of physical expression.
Debuting in May of 2000, African Footprint has toured Europe, the Americas, Asia and Australia, awing audiences that have included Prince Charles, Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela.
While ostensibly a pan-continental experience, the show was conceived and developed by creator Richard Loring as something exclusively “made in South Africa.” The production recruits dancers and musicians from within the country, and incorporates poetry by Johannesburg-born Don Mattera.
Debbie Rakusin and David Matamela’s choreography samples from familiar forms, like tap and ballet, as well as styles that have matured out of the Rainbow Nation’s often turbulent history. Pantsula, for instance, became popular in the townships in the 1980s as a form of physical articulation for frustrated youth.
A darker story lies behind the popular gumboot dancing, which nowadays is seen merely as a hearty, foot-stomping performance piece. It was devised as a means of surreptitious communication by black workers in South Africa’s gold mines during the late 19th century. Speaking was forbidden, so laborers used their waterproof Wellington boots – provided by the white overseers to prevent disabling maladies caused by fetid water – to interact with one another.
African Footprint doesn’t allow itself to become bogged down in the harsher aspects of South Afica’s history – at heart it’s a frenzied exposition of life, displaying how the body has often been used to express what words alone cannot.
// Jan 7 & 8. RMB180-1080, 7.15pm. Shanghai Grand Theatre, 300 Renmin Dadao, by Huangpi Bei Lu (6386 8686, www.shgtheatre.com)
