And So You See...!

Robyn Orlin always finds a way to talk about the things no one talks about in South Africa. And while her country was once silent in the face of Apartheid, it is now celebrating its first quarter century of democracy, so what does that tell us about racism and homophobia? How does someone claim a gender identity in South Africa today? And is there real freedom? In her writings, the choreographer argues that there isn't. She advocates her country claiming a truly African identity that would be simultaneously male and female, Christian and pagan, local and global, without the one betraying the other.

Albert Silindokuhle Ibokwe Khoza, her young performer, is all that and more. An incredible performer whose powers of transformation are infinite, since he is already everything: both a man and woman and gay, too, a dancer and an actor and a singer, as well, Christian and a sangoma (a traditional healer) but also a citizen of the world. This being with the body beyond all norms, who embodies an elusively different Africa, performs his solo on the seven deadly sins with his back to the audience, facing the huge image of himself projected onto the screen in front of him.

And if every performance presents us with a mirror in which we can see ourselves, this performance does it literally, since the camera never stops filming Albert, projecting him in constant close-up, but the audience, too, which often sees its own image on the big screen. Which is where it encounters that massive body, that scary, wonderful, sad, happy, tormented, Kafkaesque creature—a Nubian Queen, a Peacock of the Nile, an African warrior—and faces up to it. Will that body find a way to exist in a world that refuses to accept it? And don't let the music fool you: Mozart’s Requiem was never quite as happy, as danceable, as ' African', as it is in this show.