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Tranceformations
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This choreography was inspired by Bushman or San rock art and trance dancing. The San were the indigenous hunting and gathering people of southern Africa. Their trance dance or healing ritual and their rock art were both part of their complex belief system. It is likely that their rock art arose out of the experiences of the shamans or medicine men. During the healing ritual the medicine men acquired supernatural potency and they experienced an altered state of consciousness.
Tranceformations explores the physical sensations, hallucinations, and transformations visualized and experienced by the ritual healers while in trance. All the images in the choreography were depicted on the San rock art. The dance shows what the shamans do, feel and see. The final transformation in our journey takes the San into the modern world. This dance pays tribute to a dispossessed people and their culture. The choreographer drew on the work of archeologist David Lewis Williams of the Wits Rock Art Research Unit for her research.
Press quotes
The Citizen Wednesday 16 October 1991 – Marilyn Jenkins
‘Tranceformations is more than a courageous, and startingly effective, danced expression of Bushman art ; it is a homage to a lost culture and a remarkable fusion of an African dynamic with Western contemporary movement. Another dimension is also added by the utter sincerity with which the dancers follow this intensly ritualised progression towards the trance state of the shamans or medicine men. ‘
Updating: September 2013
