<body><div>Channels in the rock rise like desert monoliths. But these are mine shafts. In South Africa they sink 3000 feet down. The miners can only sing at night, in the brief hours when they come back above ground, gathered around their ramshackle sleeping places — and quietly so the mine boss will not hear.And out of the darkness they shape the world with their voices, bass and polyrhythm, percussion and incantation. In the sheer depth of their range they invoke what it takes, and what it means, to stand upright under a weight bearing down like a mountain ridge of stone.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=0Pghxr_0wB38N3q00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=0Pghxr_0wB38N3q00" width="1174" height="1600" ></figure>On a late September night, Vuyani Dance Company performed Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Boléro in the ’62 Center at Williams College, the imagining of choreographer and Vuyani founder and executive director Gregory Maqoma and musical director and composer Nhlanhla Mahlangu. The sound and the movement sweep down like a storm surge, and the force of them can knock the breath out of you – this evening is an experience to ride like a flood and stand in awe at the expanse of it – a work to carry for weeks and feel it unfold internally into new landscapes.A man walks among crosses in the dark, and he is weeping. Otto Andile Nhlapo performs as the character Toloki, a professional mourner living in South Africa under Apartheid. And he is carrying the weight of generations of pain.He is drawn from the awardwinning novels of South African writer Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni ‘Zakes’ Mda, Cion and Ways of Dying. The first novel, and the performance, open in the years after the system of Apartheid formally dissolved and elections are held. And Toloki is working in shanty towns. He is coming into families in the shock and gaping edges of a new loss, in communities already fragmented by years of the violence of the repressive system and cycles of enforced poverty. As he kneels on the earth, he is expressing grief at the death of a child, the second the mother has lost.Company dancers surround Toloki at a memorial in fast and visceral movement, lashing out, forcing him down and then lifting him up in an intense coordination of hands and bodies. They strike at him as though he is giving voice to feeling too great for them to bear and peeling back the protective iron they have grown to survive.And yet they are surviving, though they are unyeilding in showing the fear they face. Roseline Wilkens claims Toloki in a duet, and she is leading him, drawing him on with her body, confident, teasing, filling the space in long riverine stretches — and speaking at the same time in the voices of enslaved women.In clear hard words she is telling us how it feels to be pregnant, knowing the child you are carrying can be taken from you forcibly at any time — knowing your children will grow into the world you are living in, bloody and scarred and never able to rest.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=0r3eqp_0wB38N3q00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=0r3eqp_0wB38N3q00" width="1600" height="900" ></figure>In the strength of her body and the rawness of her words, she presents the kind of impossible choices Toni Morrison faces in Beloved, the courage it takes to love under that pressure, and to protect your children, to call the hounds after you so your children can get free.And the music echoes her in blues harmonica. The story moves into contemporary America and the rural south in the 1800s. The company is moving together, coordinating in precise force. And one acrobatic dancer is falling and leaping, tumbling like a holy fool. He seems to reveal the absurd and ironic vastness of loss, turning impressions upside down, launching into a musician’s arms as he calls into the wide spaces of the room.They weave influences from their own music, contemporary, hip hop, jazz, allusions to Michael Jackson. And among their own original compositions, they are kneading in music from French composer Maurice Ravel. Bolero repeats in ways that wind naturally into their musical traditions, Bongwana said.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=4Kzzyk_0wB38N3q00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=4Kzzyk_0wB38N3q00" width="1600" height="1396" ></figure>The vocalists interweave music from their own traditions, said Xolisile Bongwana, musical and vocal director from the Eastern Cape, who worked as assistant to Nhlanhla during the creation. He is singing tenor, as Simphiwe Bonongo leads vocal percussion, with Sbusiso Shozi born in Durban, and bass Fanizile Nzuza, who has performed with the internationally known Soweto Gospel Choir.Bonongo brings Hip Hop culture and the beat boxing in the piece, Bongwana said. Bongwana draws from Xhosa musical tradition and Shozi fom Zulu musical tradition – Shozi also wrote the music for the production. And Thabang Mkhwanazi, an original quartet member who has mot come on this tour, folds in Sotho music.Dancers move to the beat and flow and force of words, as performers sing and speak in three of South Africa’s 12 official languages – isiZulu, a Bantu language of South Africa, Sesotho spoken by people of Lesotho and isiXhosa, a Nguni language of the Eastern Cape.With a free reed resonance, they invoke the diaspora, the influence of blues and spirituals, the coordinated energy of a ring shout, the full-bodied grief and solidarity in Gospel. Seen from the side, the three-story-high pulley lines for the theater curtains shine in the wings like organ pipes or cathedral window glass in the moonlight.And the dancers are in a graveyard, thundering paso doble in tap and percussive rhythm. Toloki is weeping for his own grief. He has lost the woman he loves, and the life that has spilt apart, the rending impossibility he carries now, is his own. He can hardly stand, he can hardly walk, without the people and the music around him to lift him up.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=2iyYeJ_0wB38N3q00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2iyYeJ_0wB38N3q00" width="1600" height="1167" ></figure></div></body>

Mountain View, CA

NewsBreak

Vulani Company offers a ritual of mourning

Channels in the rock rise like desert monoliths. But these are mine shafts. In South Africa they sink 3000 feet down. The miners can only sing at night, in the brief hours when they come back above ground, gathered around their ramshackle sleeping places — and quietly so the mine boss will not hear.