Lockdown (dance): Khaya Ndlovu

Khaya Ndlovu
“Lockdown,’ 
26 May, video, 3:49
University of Johannesburg Arts & Culture
The Pandemic: An Interdisciplinary Art Project

Web page:  https://arts.uj.ac.za/show/PANDEMICKHAYA/
Video: https://youtu.be/ne6eQZ2rI10

Overview  Video of dance performance, with the artist initially behind an iron gate, then at one point running outside and on a park bench,  before returning indoors.

Artist's Statement: Being in a confined space when you are used to being out and free, you eventually start living in your thoughts. This made me write a poem which is illustrated my feelings while creating this work. What I created was a visual journal rather than a dancer dancing to music but, rather leaving thoughts that are connected through movement. 

Personally, I was affected positively and negatively because I always wanted to go digital But finding a to retain that face to face impact that artist need within their workspace has been hard to balance. Yes, financially it hits deeper. If you are not connected with WIFI then it will take a toll on your pocket. 

It saddens me to see that theatre spaces have been affected badly by COVID-19. However, this is the perfect time for the arts to evolve.

Pamela Allara: At the start of the coronavirus pandemic in March of 2020, the University of Johannesburg immediately called a halt to all of its arts programming, as did universities and arts organizations throughout the country as a whole. In response to the loss of those things of which “the pandemic has robbed us”, Pieter Jacobs, head of the UJ’s Arts & Culture program, announced the establishment of The Pandemic project, which would build on the existing collaborative and interdisciplinary initiatives at the University. On May 11, the UJ Choir released its 9th album, “When The Earth Stands Still,” and on the same day The Pandemic project asked 19 visual artists and 9 dancer/choreographers to submit a short (3-4 minute) time-lapse video that would respond both to the music and to the closing down of exhibitions and performances due to the crisis. To date, 7 videos documenting the artists’ initial responses have been uploaded to the website, and in 2021, the resulting videos, as well as the completed artworks, will be exhibited at the University Art Gallery.
 https://arts.uj.ac.za

Fana Tshabalala’s dance performance, “Confined By Numbers,” was released on May 22, and as Mark Auslander observed in a previous post, it succeeded in making a virtue of the fact that this most physical of the arts had to be presented in virtual form. The same is true of dancer/choreographer Khaya Ndlovu’s “Lockdown,” which was released on May 26. Although a haunting song from 1982, Ngonthando (In love alone), plays in the soundtrack, Ndlovu insists in her statement that the work is a visual journal, not a dancer dancing to music. Indeed, this work is a prose poem that she recites while moving from a barred, prison-like door, to walking along a tall, black fence, to running outdoors in an empty street. As she moves from inside to outside and back again, her attire changes from a geometrically patterned jump suit to a flowered dress, further marking the contrast between freedom and confinement. Her poetry and her dance movements are closely aligned: for instance, as she walks barefoot on dry, dead leaves blown against the seemingly endless fence posts, she asks: ”So this is what they meant when they state jail strips everything out of you?” After a beautiful interlude of dancing with her back to us in an empty street and wondering aloud about the next generation of artists, Ndlovu sits on a park bench and remarks sadly, “Jozi my city you are missed.” Returning to the prison cell-like door that appears to be the entrance to her home, she raises her arms through the bars in a prayerful gesture, and declares, “If my body can’t move, I’ll allow my soul to move.” The video thus ends with the affirmation of what the creative arts can do in a time of crisis, and that is to provide solace and inspiration.

Mark Auslander;   For generations, political legitimacy in South African liberation circles was bound up in narratives of imprisonment and liberation.  In poetry, literature, film and art, periods of incarceration were honored as trajectories of moral and spiritual rebirth.  In the 1988 film Mapantsula, for example, a small time hoodlum played by Thomas Mogatlane who had long served as an informant for Apartheid security services rediscovers within the prison cell a sense of moral integrity that he had thought long lost, and reclaims his voice as a powerful resistor to oppression.  In  the darkest moment of the State of Emergency, the prison is figured as the entire polity in microcosm on the eve of radical transformation. 

This narrative of rebirth through imprisonment is most famously developed in Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom, in which the national dream of a multiracial democracy is forged: "It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed." Precisely at the moment of maximum physical restriction,  the mind, and the soul, can run free to remake the nation in a new inclusive image.

This deep seated history provides the context of Ndlovu's film. Confinement within the household during Lockdown, while nowhere near as oppressive as actual incarceration,  is figured as a liminal period of contemplation, self-discovery, self-fashioning, and rejuvenation. The sense of confinement continues as the artist heads triumphantly out on the street, her arms upraised, while contemplating her  empty city, her fellow citizens confined. As the artist returns beyond the bars of her normally locked house gate, she moves in and out of the gate, exploring her veritable cell with her arms and the soles of her feet. At the end  she stands  triumphantly, fading into a image of her bent over in contemplation on the bench, towards her closing epiphany:  "If I cannot run with my body, then I'll allow my soul to run."  As in generations past, the compressed space of confinement paradoxically catalyzes personal liberation and a a new birth of freedom for the entire nation, on the brink of becoming something that still cannot quite yet be imagined.