Man and Machine

I’ve spent this past week doing two exciting things: hanging out with my parents who are in Cape Town to celebrate their 30^th wedding anniversary, and taking long lunch breaks so I can watch art performances for free.

That last bit requires some explanation. Allow me to introduce the Spier Performing Arts Festival:

“Cape Town has been infected…

…the squares, streets, fountains and museums of the inner-city will erupt with dance, performance, art, opera, drama and theatrical happenings.

….this is an infection worth catching.”

How could I possibly resist?

So in the last five days, I have seen a new piece of art—dance performance, street-theatre or art show—every single lunch break. It has been incredible, heady, and has made me fall in love with city life all over again.

Sometimes, though, I don’t understand modern art at all. I watched a Mozambican “punk rock” dance troupe perform a 40 minute piece entitled Mistérios da Actualidade (Mysteries of Actuality) without really getting any of it. There were five male dancers, dressed as homeless people, using dirty cardboard boxes and empty cans as props while they performed some sort of Po-Mo interpretative dance. Much too profound for a mere engineer.

Another piece I watched involved a whole bunch of characters: Charlie Chaplin-esque painted actors, roller-skaters with fans on their heads, a normal office-goer who sat and ate his lunch for the duration of the performance and many, equally bizarre, others. Somehow it all came together in a what-the-hell-the-world-doesn’t-make-any-sense-anyway-so-lets-not-pretend-art-can-make-meaning sort of way. If you know what I mean.

There was, however, one entirely spectacular performance I had the pleasure of watching on three separate occasions. There is a large parking lot near my office, across from Cape Town’s city hall, called the Grand Parade. The first time I saw this performance, entitled “Transports Exceptionnels”, opera music coming from the direction of the parking lot made me stop and explore. A part of the lot had been cordoned off, and a small bulldozer (mechanical digger) sat in the middle of it. A middle-aged man, dressed in a white shirt and black pants, was moving around the bulldozer, as the bulldozer moved around him. If you gave yourself a few minutes to get over the slight bizarreness of it, you could tell that the piece was intended to portray lovers. The deliberate movements of the dancer, as he tries to push the machine away, or embrace it, or stand in it and be lifted high off the ground, all coalesced to depict a flirty, tempestuous, passionate affaire de cœur.

Google tells me one can watch part of this piece online here.

Please do. It is phenomenal.

I’m taking next week off, to hang out with my parents. When I get back, I will have less than three months left in this part of the world. How time flies.