Kazuo Ohno is dead. That was the news that I woke up to this morning. And I was still for a very long moment. But as the bottom of my eyelid moistened quietly, I wondered what it was that could make the work of a man I had never had the pleasure of seeing live on stage, whose work I’d engaged with ideologically in the studio and vicariously through the filter of the Youtube fourth wall, so moving that I was left teary at the news of his death. Silence, stillness and subtle gestures of the darkness within and surrounding the human realm; a sense of the ghost that haunts every human being, that was the feeling that existed in the queer movements of the Butoh great. Ohno had seen horrors in his life that urged him to move. He crawled with the pain of old age after reaching a hundred years and continued to gesticulate the signals of the deep darkness of the world. He was still trying to communicate when he died at 103.
When I left the performance of Extra Ordinary by Sifiso Seleme at Goethe on Main, a week ago, I couldn’t find the words to articulate what it was that I had felt during the performance. But the feeling remained and yearned for release. Ohno has gifted me the words: silence, stillness, and a persistent darkness. I felt shame.
The unassuming and blank-faced performance began in a rather long and awkward darkness as the audience waited for the lights to come on and for the piece to begin. Seleme walks in from behind the audience of the gallery venue and in the darkness the small bells tied to the shoe laces of his thick leather boots jingle softly. When the lights eventually come up he stands on a hexagonal platform with a green-grass plastic mat. He is pasted white and wears a matronly knee-length skirt and jacket. His lips and nails are painted red. And he proceeds to attach bands to his fingers, elbows and a hook to his long dreadlocked hair, which is plaited in the style of a young school girl. As he does so a nursery rhyme chime echoes through the space. This brief piece of music will be the only recorded music played during the piece; when it ends there is no more music for the rest of the long, slow dance. The marionette girl only moves in the bands while the music chimes. She twists into different shapes quite casually. And while the audience tries to grasp what to make of the matter-of-fact images of the dance it seems as though the girl is in some sort of vacuous mental state with the colours of the dress and marionette bands bringing forth images of a straight jacket; and sacrificial lamb. When she unhooks her hair from the puppetry she places her hands over her mouth and it becomes clear that something has happened to her. The space is shrouded in silence.
In the starkness of the low-fi gallery the fluorescent lights are incorporated into a lighting sequence that seems geared toward engendering frustration. The cues are too slow to change. The blackouts are too long. And half-way through the piece there is a flashing sequence that makes the eyes contract to keep apace with the strange tap- dance that Seleme executes to the sound of the boot-bells jingling. As the tap becomes more frenetic it shifts and the plaits get undone while the skirt swishes like a pendulum so that it seems like this incessant beat will never stop. Seleme is marching! But the march is futile.
When the hand that had previously cupped over his mouth balls into a familiar fist of activism it is as though it happens involuntarily- it is just an action. The rhythm does not alter even when he climbs up and down the stairs right in front of the audience. And just as if it all means nothing at all the little girl character is changed with a visible and unhurried informal costume change. She grows up and she eventually picks up a bucket and starts wiping the floor underneath the audience’s feet. It is laboriously long. The lack of effort is frustrating. She spits into the soapy water and wipes the floor and then wipes her face clean of the melted white paint.
The silence of the whole piece makes the audience incredibly aware of each other. People look to each other to see how to react and in a simple type of Bystander Effect- where human beings are less likely to react in crowds- the audience silently agrees to acquiesce to keeping quiet. All try to sit still, as would be expected in a traditional theatre space and in the traditions of school teaching. The darkness of the piece is revealed most glaringly in its harsh use of the fluorescent lights that illuminate not only the strange performer but also the spectators who try not to react to the happenings around them. All are guilty of continuing the education of silence. All are implicated in the ghost’s un-rest. And without realising it I carried the shame of this implication until the words found their way out of my body. Seleme’s Extra Ordinary was a silent scream for the silence of humanity to become changed from its norm, to release the girl’s ghost from haunting even itself. Ohno’s legacy of queer ghostly dances has reached even beyond the nuclear bomb of Hiroshima that inspired his dark dances. The horror of what humankind is capable of reverberates in every twinge of unspoken agony that humanity refuses to recognise. Shame is a still dance.
