Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice: Dance and Live Art in Contemporary South Africa and Beyond by Catherine M. Cole

Abstract

Reviewed by: Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice: Dance and Live Art in Contemporary South Africa and Beyond by Catherine M. Cole Carla Neuss Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice: Dance and Live Art in Contemporary South Africa and Beyond. By Catherine M. Cole. University of Michigan Press, 2020. Cloth: $85, Paper: $39.9. 304 pages. 18 illustrations. In her latest book, Catherine M. Cole turns to the role of dance in the ongoing wake of apartheid in South Africa. Situated within the failed promises of the post-apartheid era, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice centers dance performance by Black artists, an area of research that Cole notes is understudied within South African performance scholarship. In centering dance and live art, this book offers a new and compelling archive of performances that extends beyond the conventional, Eurocentric boundaries of theatre to consider how embodied and kinesthetic performance encounters express, challenge, and rewrite the postapartheid era. In bringing these performances to the fore, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice invites larger considerations of the role of dance, and nonverbal performance more broadly, in post- and decolonial contexts both within and beyond South Africa. Cole's introduction sets the stage for her analysis of specific South African practitioners and performances within the profound disillusionment that has followed the failed promises of Nelson Mandela's vision for a united "Rainbow Nation." The ongoing socioeconomic inequality and racial discrimination that characterizes Black South Africans' experience informs her readings of embodied performances that speak to the suspended progress of South Africa's twenty-eight-year democracy. Acknowledging that dance is a new field of analysis for her, Cole argues that this artistic medium offers potentialities untapped by contemporary South African theatre, which she describes as stuck in a "nostalgic trap" (7) of restaging "struggle classics" (8) produced during the apartheid era. Despite this critique of theatre, chapter 1 focuses on a play written by one of the foremost playwrights of the anti-apartheid struggle: Athol Fugard's oft-overlooked [End Page 99] Statements Before and After an Arrest under the Immorality Act, originally produced in 1972. Cole's evocative exegesis of the play's portrayal of a mixed-race couple conducting an illegal affair under apartheid's miscegenation laws demonstrates apartheid's coercive control of the body. This chapter usefully foregrounds the role of the body, which will come to define Cole's subsequent chapters on dance performance; a deeper engagement with the original production's use of blackface as a complicating factor in the play's racial politics, however, would have usefully presaged later chapters' troubling of white South African artists' attempts to perform allyship. Having established apartheid's embodied injustices as enacted through theatre, in chapter 2 Cole turns to contemporary artists of color Jay Pather, Mamela Nyamza, and Sello Pesa. In addressing the syncretic and entangled influences on their respective practices, Cole offers the lens of "delamination" as "a mode of deconstruction in which the material of the now… fractures in performance into separate layers," offering the "potential to separate valuable from toxic substances" (68). Cole's close reading of Mamela Nyamza's work, artistic genealogy, and intersectional positionality exemplifies this approach. As a Black, Christian lesbian trained in classical ballet, Nyamza is an artist who is navigating the conflicting impulses of liberation and stagnation that characterize South Africa's suspended revolution. In chapter 3 Cole more explicitly turns to questions of interculturalism in the work of Robyn Orlin and Brett Bailey, white South African artists who have garnered fame—and, at times, controversy—in Europe. Cole juxtaposes Orlin and Bailey's work with that of Indian-South African practitioner Jay Pather (who was also discussed in chapter 2) to unwind issues of cultural appropriation across all three artists' work. While pieces like Orlin's Daddy I've Seen This Piece Six Times Already and I Still Don't Know Why They're Hurting Each Other satirize the centering of the white artist-auteur, Cole argues that such pieces may inadvertently reify white supremacy. As an alternative, she positions Pather as having more successfully navigated intercultural aesthetics through his collaborative relationship with the Black performers of his dance company and his...