Movement doesn’t need a thesis statement. The imagery that Transcendent shapes is unmistakeable, evocative and simple. It need not be anything more. Movement cannot lie. A single move can make you as powerful as it can make you vulnerable. And the performers beautifully hold this tension between power and vulnerability.
With direction and choreography recreated by Rusty Mowery, the show maintains a fast-paced rhythm, balancing large ensemble numbers with more intimate character-driven scenes. You’re never in doubt about what you’re getting: a Cinderella-style love story wrapped in Beverly Hills fantasy, complete with shopping montages, operatic indulgence, and sweeping emotional payoffs.
Maqoma’s work has a tendency to leave you trembling in anguish. It’s an earth shattering experience you might not be able to rationally find the vocabulary to describe. How could it be possible to say so much with just music and movement? Genesis may take you deeper you believe possible.
Ramsay is utterly formidable in this role, which brings out an immense yet delicate sense of nobility coupled with almost crippling vulnerability, and all hidden beneath the tight facade. With a profile rendered regal and indomitable by an astonishing a wig, Ramsay paints a Callas fearless, cruel, funny, irrepressibly human.
The text is penned by people much younger than Homer, which presents a flattening of the old narratives, and a simplifying of them into platitudes of anger that sees the bashing up of guys perceived to be worthy of a good bashing up, or better still, a very violent death.
Featuring phenomenal performances by Alice Findlay, Oratile Manamela, Nicola Shapiro and Ketsia Velaphi, it takes on the repetitive nature of a boarding school ethos, punctuated by gossip and politics, lessons which are both rote-based and morally confusing, and the drugs, sex and other illegal experiments conducted in the school’s interstices.
In terms of power she wields both as a character and a performer, Mpume Mthombeni as Nomsa is God in a pair of 1950s-evocative horn-rimmed specs and a dress appropriate to a middle-aged woman. She carries the world on her head and can invoke humility or catastrophe with a gesture.
‘God’s work’ is a film about ghosts and trains and broken promises. Of a brother eternally a child in the initiate’s white clay. Of a drug lord with a machete called Verwoerd, and a vast room of the dead. Of a woman who has waited one year for a train.
It’s about the wiliness of a five-year-old and the mess of political and geographical possibilities in the interstices of the Cape Flats and what can happen in the blink of an eye to a child who recognises an ostensibly friendly grown-up’s hand, without analysing it or colouring it in fear.
You don’t come away complacent from this work. Is it assaultative? Absolutely. Relatable? 100%. You feel broken, body and soul as you emerge from it. You laugh with recognition at the dark tropes and you sweat with a personal dread at where this work may go, as you experience it.
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