THE thing about the creative arts is that you need some understanding of the rules to successfully break them. Things like don’t insult your audience by quoting definitions of simple words. Don’t introduce the entire theme of your production during a juvenile pre-session in which you ask “do you think conversations have hidden meanings?” to which everyone agrees and can essentially go home.
Also refrain from having the personifications of said hidden meanings correspond so completely with the tone of the dialogue that the hidden is in fact obvious even without an ill-conceived split focus.
In ‘Dominance’, a performance art piece staged at the National Art Gallery of Namibia on Tuesday, writer and director Gift Uzera spends a cumbersome 30 minutes stating the obvious. Presenting a four-man rumination on conversations and the conversing replete with white sheet and shadows, the play plods on centered around two characters whose meanings are supposed to be cryptic.They aren’t.
Instead Bret Kamwi and Lexi Smit engage in some prosaic conversation during a dreary date stemming from tensions at work while Uzera and Alicia Brandt are thoroughly repetitious as banal manifestations of their whooping, pacing, pondering minds.
Remiss in creating any real dissonance between the characters’ body language, tone, cadence and their shadow selves, ‘Dominance’ presents as woefully infantile despite pedestrian comparisons between conversations and sex.
Foregoing any elevation of the subject matter by talking down to the audience, Uzera’s script displays far little interrogation or true understanding of the subject at hand. The lesson here is that theatre can be educational without being packaged like a pair of school teachers trying to spice up an English lesson.
And what of submission?
Stumbling monotonously towards a resolution that sees the characters take their place as dominants, the play neglects to contrast against what it means to be the listener, the victim, the obedient or the follower. Roles which are indeed taken up and discarded throughout one’s conversations, life, work and relationships and which is not an inherently negative position but rather an integral element in the construction of society.
Choosing instead to champion the dominant in a ridiculous assassination of the conversing by their shadow selves, the players then asked that the audience question their roles at home, at work and who we are around friends and family before grinding to a welcome end with the unveiling of a striking photograph by Hildegard Titus.
Note: When the artwork within the production is more interesting than the actual production, you have a problem. One which, previously promising as the creator and the cast are, should be fixed by going back at the drawing board.
Watch theatre plays live and on YouTube. For Pete’s sake, study some great stage acting and start working hard to measure up. Pay attention to lighting and staging, symbolism and structure. Show, don’t tell or lecture. Look up the words subtle and metaphor. Be subtle. Use metaphor. Or don’t. But be convincing. Be purposeful and powerful in your breaking of the fourth wall. Write something surprising, real, relevant, honest and lived.
Break a leg but only when your production is actually ready to be viewed and appraised.
Because half-baked is never a good look, time … or review.
