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The staging and lighting was both odd and unhelpful to the dance and dancers. The open stage became a distraction, lit as it was by three pools of lights which the dancers, cockroach-like, had a propensity for avoiding. The eye was thus drawn to the darkened edges of the stage or towards the musicians who were strongly lit throughout. It would have been better had the staged been edged by legs and the musicians placed further upstage at the side.

Billed as “Afro-Fusion” the movement vocabulary was in fact fairly standard modern fare danced to traditional-sounding African music, energetically performed by four musicians and a singer. Indeed the band came across the footlights far better than the dance or dancers who seemed to be dancing for themselves , totally detached from the audience. The staging was similar to a flamenco pena, with musicians ranged across the back but, unlike the pena, the dancers did not have an emotional connection with the musicians and the uneven presentation meant that the musicians often upstaged the dance and the dancers.

Mantsoe’s influences were apparent in that , when not frenzied, the movement seemed like a mating of Tai-Chi and pedestrianism. It afforded a respite from the frenetic jumping and flailing, but the work needed more subtle gradations to really grab the attention.
 

Of the dancers themselves, the men were stronger than the women and had more stage presence, although at one point a duet degenerated into a long embrace in silence, which, apart from being a rather hackneyed device, gave the dancers a long way to go to regenerate the momentum. (The singer at this point then retched and belched into the microphone, presumably to underline the apparent exhaustion of the dancers, but surely too heavy handed a touch?) The women presented a more mixed technical level; Meri Otoshi in particular had a very stiff back and upper body which limited her solos. I was unable to distinguish between the other female dancers; suffice to say that one was rather weighty and the other the most interesting of all (dressed in purple) - a fluid and centred dancer who deserved more varied choreography to showcase her skills.

It probably did not help that the house was less than half full, but the evening was flat and the audience response at best lukewarm.