Learning to Heal: South African choreographer Robyn Orlin on the aftermath of apartheid

In South Africa, a ‘sangoma’ is a healer who is in touch with the ancestors, the spirit world. It’s a practice that’s been a part of the culture for thousands of years and is legally recognised today. It’s thought that somewhere between 60 and 70% of the population consult sangomas when they’re having trouble in their lives. Far from being an unusual or alternative profession, sangomas are widely recognised and valued.

For a country whose identity has been riven by colonialism and apartheid, understanding the place of a traditional practice in the contemporary culture is important for a sense of self. Albert Khoza is a twenty-something South African. He’s also a practicing sangoma who will perform in choreographer Robyn Orlin’s recent work And so you see…, which comes to the festival this year.

“Albert for me is new generation South African. He finished school, he went to uni, he’s smart, he’s got fantastic energy, he’s a sangoma. And he really is part of this new South African generation that have a sense of themsleves.”

Orlin is speaking to me over Skype from her Berlin home. She moved to Europe with her husband, South African filmmaker Oliver Schmitz, some years ago. But the main meat of her work is still South Africa, its people and culture, its traumas and joys. In some ways, moving to Europe has brought the choreographer closer to the roots of a major preoccupation in her work: colonialism and its long-lasting impacts.

Now in her 60s, Orlin is known and highly regarded throughout Europe, but especially in France where she was awarded a knighthood in the French National Order of Merit. In the early days of her career, she made work throughout, and about, apartheid. She has always unabashedly interrogated the political status quo in her native country, including how hierarchies are perpetuated in the arts as much as elsewhere in society.

“I was really strident when I was younger, especially in the early days of apartheid. You never had anything to do with the government, you found ways of working that were completely separate to funding, and it was very hard. I was very anti-ballet in the beginning, because it really was the art form of the oppressor. No people of colour had access to ballet.”

She attributes her acute political awareness and drive to engage with politics partly to living through apartheid, and partly to her parents.

“I’m first generation South African, my family were Lithuanian Polish Jews. My parents did a very strange thing when my brother and sister and I were very young – they marched us off to a very left-wing Jewish summer camp and there I learned a lot about Martin Buber and Marxism at a very young age. And it impacted me a lot. I never went the Zionist way, which is interesting. It was more interesting for me to look at Marxism.”

Orlin used to classify herself as a ‘cultural worker’ during apartheid (“We all did, it was the ANC party line”). I ask her if her strong Marxist beliefs still hold today.

“I’m too much of a cynic now I think. Originally And so you see… was a requiem for humanity because I was feeling so disgusted with the world when I started making the piece in 2016.”

With the election of Donald Trump and the fallout since, Orlin feels that the world is becoming worryingly ever more conservative. It’s in this context that she feels it’s important to make a piece like And so you see…, which has turned out to be less a requiem for humanity and more an act of grace and healing.

“I think the world, Europe, Africa, the East, is becoming very conservative again. And I think it’s important to hold onto the sense that it’s ok to be who you are, and express yourself and be able to say what you want to say. Albert’s great. He’s really big, he loves his body, and I just love watching him love his body. He’s so inside his body and he doesn’t excuse it for a minute.”

The work questions assumptions about the conflict between traditional and contemporary aspects of South African identity (‘Why can’t you be gay and traditional? Why can’t you be a university graduate and practise traditional African medicine?’), with the personality of Khoza at its centre. The full title of the work in all its beauty is: And so you see… our honourable blue sky and ever enduring sun… can only be consumed slice by slice… It’s like a short poem, and typical of Orlin’s titles.

“I wanted to talk about greed, which is what the ‘slice by slice’ refers to. I think there’s a kind of a greed in South Africa that is a result of apartheid. I think apartheid created this greed. The title is about saying we have to learn how to not take everything. And it’s got to do with colonisation and people that have been colonised.”

Healing is at the heart of the work. But though Khoza is a professional healer, this was not a talent Orlin wanted to ‘use’ on stage.

“I would never want to put a sangoma on stage. If a true sangoma is working, they have to go into a trance to get in contact with the ancestors. And you could be there for three days. But also, I have very strong political feelings about that. It’s not something I want to show off on stage, especially in a Western theatre.”

The interest in Khoza’s identity as healer is as a facet of his personality that is just one thread of many in the complex indentity that makes him, as Orlin says, part of the ‘new generation South African’. The choreographer also feels that Khoza’s presence as a performer offers healing in a sense.

“We have to learn how to heal. I think Albert takes the audience through that, in a subtle kind of way. It’s not going to change their lives completely, but I think they experience something. Some kind of understanding that we really have to re-look at how we are in the world.”

And so you see… shows at Project Arts Centre on May 8 and 9. Book tickets here.

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