Pather's Personal and Intellectual Biography

Pather's vivid memory of his own inner-city childhood recounted above includes “the kind of ambiguity and incongruity,” as Robertson notes in the same review, “that Pather sews as a thematic thread through Cityscapes”; this is discussed further below.

Born in 1959, Pather grew up during apartheid and enduring two periods of state of emergency. His family lived in Durban where the majority of South African Indians reside even today, making it, in Anahita Mukherji's words, “the largest Indian city” (Reference Mukherji2011) outside India. Pather's Hindu household was politically aware and progressive. Pather attended the University of Durban, Westville (now called the University of KwaZulu-Natal), earning a BA (Honors) in English and African Literature in 1982. The European-based curriculum exerted a prejudicial self-consciousness about language since “deviant sounds” of nonwhite students had to be erased via laboratory exercises (Pather Reference Pather2013b). Such attitudes hardly respect one's personhood and human individuality. When Pather received a Fulbright award in 1984 to study for an MA in theater at New York University, away from the daily onslaughts of apartheid, he remarks (in the same interview) that he felt fully “human” for the first time in his life. Pather's teacher, Richard Schechner, had a significant impact on him. While in New York City, Pather encountered political theater and visual art, and came out as gay though sexuality is part of larger progressive politics. He returned to South Africa in 1985 and has been based there ever since. As a politically progressive South African citizen, Pather's artistic contributions since the 1980s intervene in struggles for a just, nonracial, nonsexist society, even after apartheid's “supposed demise” in 1994. Since 1996, Pather has been artistic director of Siwela Sonke Dance Theater Company (SSDT; “siwela sonke” translates from isiZulu as “crossing over to a new place altogether”).Footnote ⁴ The word “place” is significant in analyzing Pather's innovative site-specific work, interacting with buildings, as well as with a variety of public landmarks, whether inside Cape Town's City Hall, or outside, on iconic urban squares. In Getting Back into Place (Reference Casey2009), Edward S. Casey argues persuasively for the significance of “place” in philosophical inquiry rather than the primacy given to space and its attendant concept of time.

With his SSDT Company, Pather has choreographed award-winning works commissioned by prominent dance and arts organizations in South Africa such as FNB (First National Bank) Dance Umbrella (Johannesburg, 2003), Jomba! Contemporary Dance Festival (Durban, Reference Pather2004, Reference Pather2015), and National Arts Festival (Grahamstown, Reference Pather2003) among others. Internationally, Pather and his Company have been invited to create work at the Metropolis Biennial in the Netherlands (2009), the World Social Forum in Mumbai (Reference Pather2004), New York City's African Arts Festival (Reference Pather2004) among others. He has showcased work in Madagascar, Angola, and Zanzibar as well as in India, Germany, London, and Australia. He is the recipient of a Brett Kebble Art Award (Reference Pather2004), FNB Vita Awards for Choreography (2000), Durban city's “Living Legend” Award (2016), and the University of Cape Town's Creative Works Award (Reference Pather2016).

Pather's choreography with SSDT is hybrid as he draws upon classical Indian, classical and popular South African dance styles and contemporary dance. Along with variety of movement, Pather, like other world-class dancemakers such as Akram Khan and Shobana Jeyasingh in Britain, creates a palimpsest of movement with visual art, video, and multimedia. Such an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach adds layers to bodily movement, as when a dancer's human body works in tandem with visual art and multimedia. Further, as theorized by Erin Brannigan (Reference Brannigan2015), dance as a body of knowledge has the physical capability of intervening in, even transforming fields such as visual art. For instance, Pather's choreography in his movement and multimedia work entitled Body of Evidence (Reference Pather2008, not discussed in this essay) layers his dancers’ bodies with larger than life visual projections of parts of the human body, such as the spine, the foot, or the eyes, taken from Henry Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body ([1858] Reference Gray2015). Body of Evidence probes memories of violence, during apartheid and after, held in the human body's bones and muscles.

As with movement and visual art, the concept of “choreographer as curator,” as discussed in Tom Sellar's and Bertie Ferdman's coedited special issue, “Performance Curators,” in Theater (Reference Sellar and Ferdman2014), is highly relevant for Pather, whose curatorial activity in conceptualizing and organizing festivals in Cape Town such as Infecting the City Public Arts Festival (since Reference Pather2012), and “Live Art” (since 2014) involves his choreographic skills. Dance scholar Susan Leigh Foster in the introduction to her edited volume, Worlding Dance, notes how “dance studies is expanding and diversifying throughout the world” (Foster Reference Foster and Foster2009, 1). The role of curator, reserved until recently for visual art, is useful in redefining performance, bringing live art to live audiences, in varying locales that encourage spectator interaction. Specifically, in South Africa, taking art to diverse people in city centers and inside historic buildings confronts specific boundaries of spaces where blacks and people of color were forbidden to go during apartheid. Pather's curation of the yearly Infecting the City public art festival in Cape Town involves selecting artistic works and finding thought-provoking locations for them along with his choreographic acumen. A variety of performances during these public art festivals use inter- and multidisciplinary techniques that cross borders between dance, theater, visual art, multimedia, and technology, echoing Lefebvre's remark that multiple disciplines coming together evoke “ways to thread through the complexities of the modern world” for artists (quoted in Soja Reference Soja2000, 6).

Such synergistic connections among expressive forms of dance and music, poetry and sculpture, drama and movement are part of African and Indian worldviews that do not compartmentalize these artistic expressions and thus, are in line with Pather's South African home and Indian ancestry. As an artist-activist, his political commitment connects integrally both to South African history as well as to progressive global performance as showcased in Pather's choreography and curation of site-specific Cityscapes. The latter was performed in different sites, such as the Durban beachfront (out of bounds for blacks and colored people during apartheid) or inside a hotel room, among other locations in Durban and Johannesburg. Pather's avant-garde choreographic aesthetic includes dancers’ physical movement along with video, speech, and visual art.

Theoretical Concepts of Space and Race

Lefebvre's concepts of transforming space in order to effect social change are relevant to Pather's uses of space. I analyze the conjuncture of space and race as a critical aspect of South African history in which theorizing space begins with the struggle over land ownership between indigenous peoples and colonial occupiers. Displacement is woven into South Africa's painful history of land dispossession endured by legitimate black landowners who were driven away or forced to labor for the conquering British or Dutch. Entire indigenous groups such as the Khoikhoi were decimated in this brutal history.

The indigenous black population, composed of different ethnicities, inhabited the southern tip of the African continent. That population's history can be traced back nearly two thousand years to the San and the Khoikhoi, together known as the Khoisan people, generally identified by their occupations—the San as hunter-gatherers and the Khoikhoi as pastoral herders. In modern history, their earliest encounter with Europeans was with the Portuguese at the Cape around the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. By the end of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth century, English and Dutch seafarers entered the Cape. Europeans traded metal for the Khoikhoi's cattle. When the Dutch established the Dutch East India Company in 1652 and became settlers, battles ensued over land ownership, an ongoing issue for many South African blacks even today. Although there were three Khoikhoi-Dutch wars—in 1659, 1673, and from 1674 to1677—the Khoikhoi population was defeated, expelled, and perhaps worst of all, forcibly dispossessed of their land. The Khoikhoi suffered an enormous loss of life due to a smallpox epidemic, “against which the Khoikhoi had no natural resistance or indigenous medicines. The disease had been brought to the Cape by Dutch sailors” (South African History Online 2014).

Pather's site-specific works connect to contemporary locations as well as evoking the past when dealing with land issues of dispossession rooted in the Native Land Act of 1913. There is a continuing search for the reclamation of property and human dignity as showcased in Pather's curated symposium entitled “Land: Performances, Installations, Film Screenings” (November 21–24, 2013). This symposium took place under Pather as director of the GIPCA at the University of Cape Town. In “Land” creative artists and scholars explored trajectories of personal history, home, and displacement. As video artist Sivuyiswe Giba notes poignantly in a multimedia installation:

Pather has also curated symposia on various subjects such as “Republic: Art, Nation-State, and Authority” (2011) and “Remaking Place” (Reference Pather2015) at GIPCA. In 2014, he launched the Live Art Festival in Cape Town; in 2017, this festival took place under GIPCA's new name: Institute for Creative Arts (ICA), with Pather continuing as its director.

Another community to which Pather belongs, namely, South Africans of Indian origin, dealt with issues of belonging from the time of their migration to South Africa. Some of them had been indentured laborers and others had been free traders. This community, caught in the middle between whites and blacks, continues to occupy an uncomfortable in-between space. Indians constituted their own immigrant community in this new land where their commonalities took precedence over their religious, regional, caste, and class differences as defined in India. Under apartheid, since 1948, this community was controlled under systemic racial divisions, as were blacks and coloreds, until independence in 1994, when Nelson Mandela was voted in as the first black president of a democratic South Africa.

Although Pather's goals are never narrowly ethnocentric (as in connecting only to his Indian ancestry), his progressive vision significantly uses art to militate against injustices to South African blacks (majority) as well as to brown and colored peoples who were excluded from the full privileges of citizenship. Painful expressions of exclusion forbade blacks and coloreds from public spaces. During apartheid they suffered outsiderness, even as citizens, from certain whites-only locations. The Group Areas Act of 1950 deliberately forced people of different races living harmoniously side-by-side to give up their homes and move to segregated areas, partly to prevent intercommunity political activity against apartheid. South Africans of Indian origin experienced this legislation most bitterly as they had to give up their homes bought after years of hard work and move to separate ethnic enclaves.

Even in postapartheid times (similar to what Neil Lazarus describes as not the morning but the “mourning after” independence in many postcolonial nations), the apartheid legacy of where blacks can afford to live and work continues to haunt the majority, who still live in townships at the edges of cities, enduring economic inequities (Lazarus Reference Lazarus1990, 4). It remains ironic that one of the definitions of space found in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a continuous area or expanse, which is free, available, or unoccupied” (2000), was falsified completely by apartheid's racialized system of segregating and mandating where different colored populations could live. Lefebvre's passionate argument that occupying certain spaces is connected to possibilities of revolutionary change, connects to Pather's choreography in postapartheid times as seen in Cityscapes and other works, wherein South African black and colored citizens reclaim spaces denied to them during apartheid.

Similarly, it is appropriate for my analysis of Pather's work to consider ideas advanced on “site” as a multidimensional concept. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “site” (as opposed to “space”) as connected to a concrete place where “a particular event or activity is occurring or has occurred” (2000). In Site-Specific Performance (Reference Pather2010), Mike Pearson puts forward two issues regarding “site” that resonate with Pather's site-specific work. First, Pearson cautions against defining a “type” of site, whether .site-determined, site-oriented, site-referenced, site-conscious, site-responsive, or site-related. Although each site has different nuances, in this essay., I focus on Pather's site-specific work that can move from outdoor locations, for example, from a city center, to indoors, such as inside a shopping mall. In these various configurations of sites, it is important to recognize that they can overlap. For instance, a site-specific work may be connected, indeed determined by a location's historical significance, such as the Slave Museum in Cape Town or Constitutional Hill in Johannesburg. Even if a locale's history is familiar to onlookers, an artist like Pather may subvert, question, or draw out different meanings from the site's historical resonance, making it relevant for contemporary times.

Pather's site-responsive choreography (not discussed in this essay) is related to site-specific works, though the former has additional meanings that connect a work's theme to its location. Site, as part of a larger discussion of space, includes related words such as “place,” “location,” and most important, Pather's use of history-saturated sites that add the dimension of time to considerations of site. This provokes the conjuncture and disjuncture of when (temporal dimension) a performance is most relevant in a certain site (spatial).Footnote ⁵

Second, Pearson's preference to define site-specific work as “performance: to embrace the fullest range of practices originating in theatre and visual art, and to demonstrate affiliations with the academic field of performance studies” (Reference Pearson2010, 15), echoes with Pather's embrace of the word “performance” to delineate his multifaceted work located in many sites (Pather Reference Pather2013b). Pather enables us “to keep our contemporary consciousness of spatiality, our critical geographical imagination” “creatively open to redefinition and expansion in new directions; and to resist any attempt to narrow or confine its scope” (Soja Reference Soja2000, 2).

When asked, “how he determines his sites” in an interview with Terri Davidoff, Pather responds: “It is something about [the sites] that is iconic, the genus loci or spirit of the place. … It has to do with the underlying raison d’ être of the spaces themselves that are sometimes aesthetically loaded and at other times proffer other possibilities, not least of which is to comment on the space itself” (quoted in Davidoff Reference Davidoff2006, 141). Pather's faith in the human body that can “control meanings within what can potentially be alienating urban spaces” is expressed in his essay, “Shifting Spaces, Tilting Time” (Reference Pather, Pieterse and Simone2013a, 433). He portrays dynamic interactions between certain well-known architectural buildings, such as Durban City Hall or Cape Town railway station, and the people inside these sites or walking outside them.

Pather attains his goal of providing access and belonging to people previously kept outside city centers by creating new ways of communicating among diverse South Africans. He challenges the vestiges of apartheid laws by taking over whites-only spaces for all South Africans. By performing in recently still segregated geographical spaces, Pather enables unlikely populations to rub shoulders literally in public spaces where during apartheid, blacks and whites remained totally separate in their daily lives and rarely shared any artistic work together. Pather confronts the apartheid-era attitudes of white superiority that led to low self-esteem for blacks by including blacks as performers and spectators in his site-specific work. As dancers and viewers, blacks reclaim their rights as South African citizens with their full humanity. Pather's uses of specific sites creates spaces for communication across communities. He reclaims the “public” in public spaces, hence democratizing space.

Pather interrogates discriminatory attitudes that regulate who belongs in certain public spaces, who is left out, and how public art can foster a sense of belonging. Without romanticizing the possibilities of public art, he aims to challenge “a kind of alienation” propagated by certain artistic forms and to show how public art potentially enhances “interconnectedness” among South Africa's diverse people (Pather Reference Pather, Pieterse and Simone2013a, 433). He admits that his early work, though well received, “did not reach the kind of audience [that he] was interested in, an audience whose roots [he] share[s]” (437). In order to appeal to such spectators, he incorporated popular South African urban dance forms such as pantsula and discovered that “public art may well be an ideal link” between artist and audience.Footnote ⁶

Pather's performers, in site-specific and other works, include black women with ample hips, “big bodies or small bodies, men who are not the princes of ballet” (Pather Reference Pather2005a, quoted in Davidoff Reference Davidoff2006, 136). He layers his choreography innovatively from a palette of dance languages—South African dance styles such as Zulu and Xhosa (denigrated during colonial and apartheid eras, that Pather recuperates as “classical” with their own idioms), Indian classical dance styles such as bharatanatyam and kathak, South African popular dance styles such as pantsula, isicathimaya, gumboot dance, along with a hybrid commingling of modern and contemporary dance. Pather is profoundly conscious of South Africa's colonial legacy; hence, even as he deploys modern and contemporary dances of Western origin, he uses them as relevant for the South African context.Footnote ⁷ He emphasizes the language of gesture, of physical theater and the body, that can transcend linguistic barriers among speakers of South Africa's eleven languages recognized by the country's constitution.

In his interview with Davidoff, Pather cites two main elements that attract him to site-specific work: first, he embraces the challenge of taking contemporary art to the street and presenting it in a way that is not patronizing to an audience of passersby, but with full attention to technical details of lighting, music, and costume. He is committed to making such work available to people of modest means who may never have set foot in a theater (Pather Reference Pather2005a, quoted in Davidoff Reference Davidoff2006, 139). The second element lies in Pather's interest in dialogues between the moving body in space and spatial tension. The performer interacts with space that is regarded “as animate, as a powerful conveyor of meaning and emotion. The performer engages with the space in both a physical and an emotional manner” (139).

Site-Specific Cityscapes’ Roots in Ritual and in Postmodernity: Space and the State

Pather does not claim to be doing something new in his site-specific work, such as in Cityscapes, since outdoor performances are rooted in ritual in both ancient and modern times. In ritual, there is transformative potential, whether in a temple or on the street. These spaces are remarkably different from the confined spaces of indoor theaters where audience responses are controlled by the walled space itself. Not to romanticize the “freedom” (and rigors) of the street, however, there is an open-endedness to the affect produced by dancers/actors and a similar freedom for spectators who can engage or simply leave the space at will. The flexibility of outdoor space allows dancers/actors to interact with spectators, some of whom may have stopped out of curiosity. This may lead to unplanned responses. The roots in ritualistic practices of storytelling or communal sharing lie beneath contemporary site-specific performances.

Along with ancient ritual, Pather notes in “Shifting Spaces, Tilting Time” that in inner city urban spaces “our rituals have changed concomitant with a fledgling democracy … [with] our embrace of an international post-modernity” (Reference Pather, Pieterse and Simone2013a, 435). He welcomes the postmodern approach with its gaps and fissures, finding that “site-specific performance in referencing its history to ritual … allows for momentary coherence that [he] has found to be compelling” (435).

In Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Reference Carlson1989), theater historian Marvin Carlson discusses how places of performance embody social and cultural meanings, “which in turn help to structure the meaning of the entire theatre experience” (26). Carlson continues: “City street and market places continued to serve for the ancient forms of civic entertainment—the parades and processions … the acrobats, farceurs, and mimes whose descendants may still be seen today in the clowns, mime, fire-eaters, and jugglers found in such popular urban gathering places” (26). Even as cities around these performances change, and even as traditional city squares may disappear, their “modern equivalents (are) found in pedestrian malls” where walking and shopping occurs together (27). He notes that French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an early proponent of outdoor performances. Rousseau “recognized a connection between the institution of theatre and the urban culture in which it developed”; he distrusted both and “banned both the institution of theatre and its architectural housing from his ideal republic, which was to have only open-air festivals, civic celebrations” (Rousseau quoted in Carlson Reference Carlson1989, 29). According to Carlson (Reference Carlson1989, 32), Romain Rolland took Rousseau's banning of indoor theater further into “a condemnation of capitalism.” Rolland favored “proletarian pleasures” in the open air and remarked that: “A happy and free people needs festivals more than theatre houses” (Rolland quoted in Carlson Reference Carlson1989, 32).

Pather is in line with these thinkers in recognizing the semiotics of the street, skillfully and artistically mining specific locations’ political, even overdetermined resonances in racially divided South Africa. Performance theorist Richard Schechner describes activities that unfolded in nontheatrical sites, such as marches for civil rights and other protest gatherings, challenging state authorities as “American prototypes” of theatre (Reference Schechner2003, 67). In apartheid South Africa, funeral processions often turned into political rallies on the streets and were confronted by police. Spaces contain discriminatory practices imposed by the state. Spaces also hold memories, whether in the confined walls of a prison or in the open market square.

Pather gives new meaning to working “on the edge,” startling spectators with creative interventions that challenge the history of segregated spaces, embodying what Lefebvre describes in The Production of Space as “the long history of space, even though space is neither a ‘subject’ nor an ‘object’ but rather a social reality—that is to say, a set of relations and forms” ([1974] Reference Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith1991, 116). Let me illustrate how Pather's use of a site ignites its “long history” via a segment of Cityscapes that unfolds in a prestigious shopping mall that carries apartheid-era remnants of a whites-only area. Pather disrupts this past by presenting black dancers as business men wearing suits and carrying brief cases in this space, not attending to business activities but dancing pantsula. Through his innovative juxtaposition of black business men dancing pantsula, Pather aims to startle diverse spectators, even inspire unexpected conversations among those who would usually inhabit segregated neighborhoods inside or outside cities. Pantsula and namastap (folk dance forms from western South Africa and southern Namibia) performers dressed in Armani suits with cell phones surprise spectators who recognize the styles and see them in fresh ways in their contemporary representation with performers dancing to a remix of Carl Orff's “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana (1935).

Gumboot dancers performing in another section of the traditionally whites-only shopping mall evoke postmodern juxtapositions between people shopping and the dancers. Created by black miners, gumboot dance is rooted in their work experience wearing gumboots in mucky environments underground. Davidoff recognizes that “such juxtapositions not only erode decades of prejudice … but ultimately develop understanding” among diverse people (Reference Davidoff2006, 148).

Similar to Lefebvre distinguishing among different kinds of spaces—physical, mental, social—exploring “’real’ space, namely, the space of social practice” (Lefebvre, [1974] Reference Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith1991, 14), Pather, too, deploys these different registers in the South African context. “Social spaces” during apartheid, marked and marred by racialized divisions, forced black bodies to segregated margins in townships with substandard living conditions; they could enter white neighborhoods only to provide labor. There was the further outrage of the misnomer of rural “homelands” to which blacks were relegated, where the land was arid and economic opportunities minimal. Spatial designations of everyday life—the marketplace, a shopping center, a park—remain regulated and still need decoding in postapartheid society. Pather's site-specific work confronts old racial codes and echoes Lefebvre's question, namely, “what paradigms [would] give them [spatial codes] their meaning, [and] what syntax governs their organization?” ([1974] Reference Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith1991, 16). Lefebvre continues: “If indeed spatial codes have existed, each characterizing a particular spatial/social practice, and if these codifications have been produced along with the space corresponding to them, then the job of theory is to elucidate their rise, their role, and their demise” (17). “Spatial codes” to use Lefebvre's phrase, governed particular bodies during apartheid. Postapartheid society opens up avenues for curating public art that is Pather's passion. As curator of the largest and most diverse annual public arts festival in South Africa, Infecting the City, Pather aims to reclaim the “interconnectedness” among diverse South Africans that was “impeded” during apartheid, leading to “physical and psychic separation still waiting to be healed” (Pather Reference Pather2012). He adds that “public art” can enable this healing since “it has always been a part of who we are on this continent, in this country, given our history of public ritual, public protest, and celebration.”

Pather's aesthetic-political goals of access and of connecting diverse South Africans are realized in Cityscapes. In 2002, such site-specific work was quite new in South Africa. My analysis of Cityscapes relies on South African veteran journalist, Adrienne Sichel. As an engaged witness, her observations are vivid, astute, and reliable in terms of her position as arts writer for The Star (equivalent in stature to the New York Times). I also draw upon artist-scholars’ comments such as those from Lliane Loots, lecturer in theater at the University of KwaZulu Natal, artistic director of both Flatfoot Dance Company and Jomba! Contemporary Dance Experience Festival as well as those from Clare Craighead, assistant artistic director of Flatfoot Dance Company.

In Cityscapes, Pather reimagines cartographies of belonging where the human body, dialoguing with architecture, remains a site of historical and political references. Pather's choreography of Cityscapes negotiates interactions between Durban's iconic architecture and people. In his director's notes, Pather remarks: “Spaces shape movements of people who, in turn, shape those spaces” (quoted in Robertson Reference Robertson2002). Journalist Heather Robertson in “Space Explorer” notes that Pather offers a “prosaic impetus” for his site-specific work on city streets in his remark: “I'm fascinated by Durban's architecture and the reason is quite pedestrian. I'm a pedestrian—I don't drive” (Pather quoted in Robertson Reference Robertson2002).

Spatial correspondences between brick and concrete and live human bodies fosters connections among people, previously separated forcibly. It is significant that Pather chose Durban as the site for this work, the city in which he grew up and that is historically significant as the port where the first indentured Indians arrived in the 1860s; today, Durban has the highest number of South Africans of Indian origin. In Cityscapes, Pather commemorates Durban's sites such as Grey Street known for its Indian businesses and the beach front among other locations. Pather's imagination interacts with this city “in a way that celebrates our uniqueness as Durban(ites)” (Pather quoted in Loots Reference Loots2002). In “Cityscape ‘happenings’ [that] catch Durban off guard” (Reference Pather2002), Sichel comments usefully that Pather has “lovingly hijacked architecture and landscape that he [has] impregnated with dance and music forms which tap into the city's glorious cultural contradictions and dazzling incongruities. It also plugs straight into Pather's yeasty social transformation and displaced identities. Race, religion, tradition and art are catapulted into fresh aesthetics and expressions” (10).

Sichel's vivid account in the same review, “Cityscape ‘happenings’ [that] catch Durban off guard” (Reference Sichel2002) enables us to visualize the five segments of Cityscapes performances across Durban:

Sichel provides lively details about Cityscapes’ outdoor performance at North Beach where Pather used “Shembe reed rattles, Celtic steel taps and Kathak bells [that] echo, and transmogrify Indian Ocean waves” (10). Further, South African scholar, Clare Craighead in her essay “When the Rainbow is Not Enough: Site-specificity, the body as site, and intercultural practice in Jay Pather's Cityscapes (Durban Reference Pather2002)” analyzes how each dance form “interprets and accesses” the rhythm of the waves without any one of the three dance forms dominating (Craighead Reference Craighead2010, 270). Craighead continues:

Another site of Cityscapes showcases a startling image of a black woman rapp-jumping down the wall of the upmarket shopping mall called Musgrave Centre. Pather comments to journalist Heather Robertson in “Space Explorer” (Reference Robertson2002) that this dramatic jump enables him to parody consumerism and the risks involved when people move up in economic class with privileges of credit cards instead of cash. The possibility of using plastic is exciting and fearful especially for folks moving from rural to urban areas, along with making the change from cash to credit.

During the “Hotel” segment of Cityscapes, Pather involves his performers and spectators in a profoundly intimate scenario. “Hotel” is set inside a fifth-floor room at the Albany Hotel (Durban), where ten spectators stand close to the two performers as witnesses rather than onlookers in a traditional performance. The audience becomes part of the intimacy as they participate, given the closeness, almost viscerally in the fraught relationship between a white man and black woman. The movements vary between tenderness and violence (based on physical theater) as Pather uses “language as a point of communicative clash (where performers Ntombi Gasa and Denton Douglas speak across each other in isiZulu and English respectively)” remarks Craighead, “and at other times engaging a more subtle communicative clash through the notion of secrecy” (Craighead Reference Craighead2010, 272). The climax is stunning as a tall, clay-covered figure emerges from a cupboard, puts on “a pair of dark sunglasses and is wrapped in brown/gold tulle”. This visual image showcases what Craighead endorses as Pather's artistic acumen in mixing “traditional and the contemporary cultures in South Africa” (272).

Although Cityscapes was presented first in 2002, “the seeds” for the “Hotel” segment, Pather remarks, were planted years back in 1996 when he stayed at The Albany Hotel in central Durban for four weeks while working on his dance-theater work, Ahimsa-Ubuntu (Reference Pather1996). Since Pather does not drive, he remarks: “walking a lot, but also walking on late afternoons, early morning, I would see the city in a very different way and almost, it was like seeing in black and white. I began to be aware of a city, that without the people, speaks … is resonant … there are these ghosts … these voices … but when you put people in … the dialogue is so rich” (unpublished interview with Craighead in 2005, quoted in Craighead Reference Craighead2010, 272).

Cityscapes, funded by South Africa's National Arts Council, the National Arts and Culture Trust, and Durban Arts, is remarkable most especially for “its collaborative impetus” remarks Sichel (Reference Sichel2002, 10). The work included forty-two dancers from different dance companies—Eric Shabalala's Shwibeka Dance Company, One Hour Pantsula Company, the Celtic Dance Company, Pravika's Kathak Kendra, Lliane Loots’ Flatfoot Dance Theater Company, and video artists Junaid Ahmed, Thando Mamma, Storm Janse van Rensburg, and Greg Streak, who documented the site-specific performances from their own perspectives and later shared them in the Durban Art Gallery for a paying audience. In the same review, Sichel judges this collaborative enterprise as setting “new parameters for public art … and rais(ing) the bar on cultural tourism. Cityscapes is about exposing heritage and cross-pollinating peopled spaces” (Reference Sichel2002, 10).

In 2003, the prestigious FNB Dance Umbrella invited Cityscapes to Johannesburg. Sites selected in this city included the Oriental Plaza, the Carlton Centre escalators, the upscale Sandton shopping center (associated with expensive stores and wealthy clients), and a room inside the Devonshire Hotel in Braamfontein. As in Durban, the performances culminated at the Johannesburg Art Gallery with fifty dancers drawn from Johannesburg and Durban, with video artists “insinuating” themselves, in Sichel's vivid words, “into the crevices of public life and individual imagination with creative stealth and artistic guile” (Reference Sichel2003, 10). Among the multiethnic dancers were white South Africans from the South African Ballet Theatre, appearing alongside classical Indian dancers of the Tribhangi Dance Theater Company along with black Shembe worshippers from Moving into Dance Mophatong, and Siwela Sonke dancers carrying silver umbrellas. An amazing juxtaposition unfolds when amid the sounds of ankle bells and Shembe rattles, “a boy on a skateboard zooms by in the shopping center—appearing to be a neighborhood kid” remarks Sichel, but “he was, in fact, Siwela Sonke's dancer, Denton Douglas” (10).

In showcasing different races performing together, Pather does not endorse the postapartheid slogan of simunye, translated as “we are one” in the new “rainbow nation.” Rather, he deploys what Sichel calls “an ingenious ploy,” namely, having all his performers’ bodies and faces, ballet dancers, black, colored, and classical Indian dancers, “painted white with umako powder used for rituals. Skin-tone becomes irrelevant in this most color-conscious of societies. What counts are the rhythmic bodies, dancing to recorded ocean waves and Baaba Maal” (Reference Sichel2003, 10). The ideal of “we are one” is hardly a reality in postapartheid South Africa; rather, this enforced unity paradoxically fosters separateness of local cultures and is similar, as Craighead notes, “to apartheid policies around ‘separate but equal’” (Reference Craighead2010, 260). The slogan of simunye encourages an uncritical celebration of multicultural unity; Pather objects to enforcing a fake unity among diverse people. His objections are echoed by Lliane Loots, who argues astutely that “multiculturalism in South African performance practice has lulled us into another type of stereotyping (dare one say racism)” (Loots Reference Loots2001, 12). Rather, interculturalism “as a cultural in-betweenness, a place where cultures meet, dialogue and often clash,” contends Craighead, is more resonant than multiculturalism in considering Pather's site-specific work (Reference Pather2010, 261). Pather's interculturalism raises important issues of “cultural access” and “ownership,” and as Craighead notes, is realized in performance via “cultural layering and clashes within spheres of cultural practice and production” (262).

Cityscapes was Pather's first site-specific work that marks a significant period in his career as well as serving as a historic marker, as Craighead notes, “within the local South African performance-scape” (Reference Pather2010, 269). Pather's unique contribution lies in his selection of particular spaces, along with his creative inclusion of various dance styles and companies as well as local video artists who document segments of Cityscapes from their points of view. These videos, screened inside an art gallery link the outside locales of this video-making to the inside space of a gallery. Further, Pather transforms the usual gallery ambience by challenging separation of art works from spectators since these videos showcase dancers who are now the audience.

Sichel's reflection on Cityscapes over ten years after its first performance in Reference Sichel2002 encapsulates its key achievements: “Cityscapes plays with various clichés, textures, histories, architectural contexts and iconographies to create fresh aesthetics, which contain familiar touchstones but are wide open to interpretation” (e-mail to author, March 31, Reference Sichel2014). Pather himself in his Reference Pather2015 TEDx talk entitled, “A Love Affair with Space,” expresses his continuing fascination with urban sites for performance:

Pather draws on his skills as choreographer, curator, and theater director in his site-specific work in order to facilitate access to public spaces for diverse South African performers and audiences and to ignite dialogues among them. His creative choreography opens up new interpretations of dance forms, popular and classical, located in unexpected locales and in creative juxtapositions. Even as he recognizes the immense challenges facing South Africa, he remains hopeful that art plays a significant role in social justice work and that it uplifts ordinary South Africans’ spirits, even when faced with inequities rooted in apartheid and prevailing in postapartheid times.