Vuyani: Mourning our collective history, heart

Vuyani Dance Theatre, from South Africa, performed "Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Boléro" on Thursday night at Williams College '62 Center for Theatre and Dance.

​They did it again. The curators at Williams College ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance have once again shared with Berkshire audiences an international work that is emotionally stirring, thought-provoking and completely mysterious -- one that no eye could be torn from and a work that could likely be seen nowhere else in the region.
 
Gregory Maqoma’s “Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Bolero,” as seen and heard on Thursday night at the college, is a memorable landscape that mines lost, fear, power, religion in a graveyard of our collective heart. As danced by Maqoma’s versatile ensemble Vuyani Dance Theatre from South Africa, the work draws on the rhythms of Ravel’s building theme while questioning the world’s seemingly endless inhumanity.
 
Everything about this work was astonishing. The first thing to draw audiences in was the set – a foggy cemetery where crosses, and only crosses, dotted the stage’s periphery.
 
“Cion” begins with a professional mourner – played by one of four isicathamiya musicians. He stumbles from cross to cross, wailing. Then the lights rise on the back of the stage to see a still group of nine – lit from above they look like the souls that rose from the graves. They are the ghosts of our past. They hold the secrets of our history. They reveal to us – through the work – brutality in the name of social order and hierarchy that when challenged lashes out to kill.
 
Otto Andile Nhlapo played the central figure, a cruel overseer of the group, punishing one with painful twists to his ear. Yet the band of dancers reveres him, hold him up sky, surround him, follow him. Yet in the end, they seek to escape him and the back-breaking labors that are required under his scrutiny.
 
But Nhlapo, by tapping into popping and locking skills, showed that he wasn’t fully human – unaware of the pain he caused including in his attempts to seduce a woman, danced coyly by Roseline Wilkens, who was attempting to survive his attention. 
 
There were some dramatic moments that seared in the mind’s eye – the slapping of burlap bags upon the stage representing the endless work, the flight of two men shaking with fear and anxiety and the besetting of a trio of dogs, that ultimately killed Nhlapo’s chosen woman – leading him too to mourn.
 
Throughout, the sounds of Ravel’s “Bolero,” as performed by the quartet of a capella vocalists, sneaked into a soundscape that of cries, screeches, calls, tongue clicks, hand claps and feet stomping that shot forth into every corner of the theater. Musical director and composer Nhlanhla Mahlangu is a genius, melding this well-known classical composition with the equally precise Zulu choral tradition.
 
At the end, with the rhythms of “Bolero” reaching their zenith, the dancers reappear, shrouded in black lace, hats and tap shoes reflecting the beat of the music. They are both mourners and the dead, seeking justice from an uncaring society. But sadly, they are trapped in a veil that has one wondering if it can ever be lifted.