Paper + Roses reviewed by Sange Mpambani
My walk to the show Paper and Roses started at UCT’s Hiddingh campus where the shuttle drops me. I walk to the show’s venue at around 19h20 and I notice that there’s a shift in the atmosphere of this side of Cape Town. An energy in the air that already tells you that the Investec Cape Town Art Fair is approaching. And Thursday, we witnessed the State of the Nation Adress (SONA). The city is busy – you cannot miss the hum and vibrancy – I picked it up as well while walking down Loop Street to Hout Street to watch the show. The haunting hum of neocolonial and apartheid legacies, the German language that registers in my ears from the restaurants I walked past, the rent prices that are skyrocketing every single day, the digital nomads. I pick all this Cape Town discorded and violent hum to the second floor of a building in Hout Street that welcomes us to a show that is the most anarchic, audacious, and beautifully absurd piece of theatre I have ever witnessed in Cape Town.
Immersive theatre
In the building called The Outlore Base where they say theatre shows that are experimental, unconventional, and risqué find a home, we entered a room of something quite strange to what you would normally have in mind when you are going to watch a work of theatre. Here you encounter a dimly lit room, red strained paper installations, galvanized zinc walls, bodies (people?) wearing all demin clothes and appearing to be in search of something or someone, posters on the wall, a person is wanted. In this building, the theatre show shares a room with a bar that allows the audience autonomy to buy drinks and snacks while the performers are in the middle of a performance. How the room is curated, from the bar to the show’s stunning set design you are ultimately immersed in and transported to a world that is yet to be revealed to you.
A utopia that is rebellious
In the underground choreography of bodies whose voices are torn, we are invited to a world that is then and there in the words of a writer that is close to my heart Estaban Jose Munoz - a utopia that is rebellious. That evades capture. Flourishes in the wild, in the break, in the cracks of a new state that has just usurped power.
Set in the early 1980s and 1990s where political unrest seems to be brewing in this world we have been immersed in, there is a revolution that is fighting back led by Adam Rose. However, in the development of the storyline when it arrives to Adam Rose being introduced to us, I am bothered by the romance between these characters – Adam Rose and Isabelle Beaumont – that occurs right at the centre of a revolution. And this relationship between these characters doesn’t make sense to me – it as if we have come to witness a lovey-dovey show that fashions itself as a revolution. But, to contradict myself here by way of bell hooks; we revolt because of our ability to love.
I must note the brilliance and energy of the dancers and the choreography that steps in to save the work from completely sinking from what I observe is a script and perhaps directing that must be reworked – rethinking the relationship and development of the main characters in relation to a story that, in my eyes, calls for a revolution in this time as we know it. A story that is relevant now when consider the current political climate of South Africa.
Production: Paper and Roses
Script Writer: Kimberly Buckle
Director: Bianca Rassmussen
Choreographer: Nkosinathi Mazwai