My View: Guard on Shift

“Guard on Shift”, rips our complacency with crafted sound and a potent installation which moves us to a place deeper than obvious emotions.

“Guard on Shift” directed by Sue Pam-Grant with musical composition and direction by Xoli Norman. Designed by Danie Daschner and Christoff Wolmarans (set), Sue Pam-Grant and Jurgen Meekel (video), Sue Pam-Grant (costumes), Declan Randall (lighting). Performers: Lesedi Job, Thabo Mashishi, Yolandi Nortjie, Simphiwe Sekhute, Nqobile Sibeko and Sister Zungu. Dance Factory, Newtown. Until November 1. 011 833 1347.

You first notice the washing. Hand-made undergarments of unbleached calico, they hang, crumpled, vulnerable in stark light. Their videoed image is flung against the brickwork at the back of the stage, rising and falling with wind, like ghosts. But you notice this subliminally as you are jousted and shifted along by your fellow audience members through the installation.

The path is narrow, circumscribed by wire fencing. The plot is cast by a rudimentary maze, with bricks and wire. It is stultifying. My hand touched the wire at some point by mistake; I felt my whole body instinctively twinge; they aren't electrified. The power of the gesture of bringing the audience into the work compulsorily, conceptually and emotively yet never gratuitously, is incomparable. You find a seat in the auditorium, your heart rushing, plummeting, numbed.

The four women performers are stationed at points inaccessible by the maze. They are gated in. The culmination of the maze is the guard hut: a humble wooden structure, occupied by words, a crutch and tissue-filled shoes. The words are the inner dialogue of he who has this type of hut as his only resting spot, while at work, through the night. Like a vertical coffin, it’s just big enough to house a man seated or standing upright, this structure is iconic in our crime-thick society.

“Guard on Shift” is a tour de force. As it visually quotes suburban criticism of the typecast guard, but navigates his humanity, it is never prescriptive. In an unstated backdrop to the focus, we understand the protective role the guard on shift ostensibly offers people whose lives are deemed more valuable. But there’s another subtext, which left me driving back to suburbia looking at truck drivers on the highway, maids in doek and apron walking the dark streets, the guards on shift: those whose thankless, sometimes dangerous, jobs squeeze them into the bottom rung of our society in service of the middle class: the unthanked, the paltrily paid, the oft invisible.

The music is glorious in its discordant articulation. Think of the plaintive lyrics and musical phrasing in “Madam please”, Sophie Mgcina’s song. Think of the layering of social text and voice in Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes”. Interspersed with Thabo Mashishi on the trumpet playing from the back of the auditorium, the sound achieves stunning cohesion, words drop from the four women’s mouths like pebbles.

“Guard on Shift” could fit into protest song repertoire, but for its lack of literality and the conceptual meat of its installation, as well as the interface between performers, audience and quoted words, criticising the nameless, faceless, personality-less archetypal guard, punched into the back wall of the stage. But the work is about more than poetically crafted lyrics and quoted emails. Its greatest strength is in its numbing repetition.

At the outset, the voices, the lined washing, the experience of the maze is electrifying. You don’t know where to look first. As the shift extends, the repertoire is repeated. The work lasts but 45 minutes; it telescopes the repetitiveness of guard work, graphically offering us a gloss on the time to contemplate many vulnerabilities, above all, one’s own.

“Guard on Shift” completely lacks self-indulgence - or even articulated (patronising) pity for these peripheral people. It’s a bare brutal portrayal of intransigent values that pepper and coddle us into a complacency of security. A lucid, wise piece that glosses the incompetence in the running of our country by pointing fingers within, not without.


Picture: Yes
Submitted by Robyn Sassen




Soundtrack for survival in destruction
November 4, 2008

By Adrienne Sichel

Guard on Shift

Theatre Installation: Sue Pam-Grant and Xoli Norman

Producer/Curator: Indra Wussow

Set: Daschner Designs

Lighting: Declan Randall

Performers: Thabo Mashishi (trumpet), Sister Zungu, Nqobile Sibeko, Yolandi Nortije, Lesedi Job, Simphiwe Sekhute

If a painting or a sculpture could sing its innermost thoughts and concerns it would sound like this - honest, haunting, disturbing and memorable.

The fact that this theatre installation produced by kunst:raum sylt quelle and jozi art lab, in association with The Market Theatre, has been curated (as any art exhibition would be), enriches the riveting cross-discipline interaction of this starkly poetic tour de force.

In her programme note the curator refers to the psycholo-gical contradictions prevalent in South African society and its suburbia as the "true 'heart of darkness' " and Guard on Shift's exploration of psychological landscapes and social paralysis.

If anyone could tackle this daunting brief in a subtly tactile yet devastatingly effective way it is Sue Pam-Grant. Her recent art making based on dressmaking patterns, dovetailing with her writing skills and theatrical experience, provides the visual anchor for Guard on Shift and a springboard for her rigorous collaboration with composer Xoli Norman and the six performers.

The spectator enters The Dance Factory side door (flanked by a real wire razor wire topped security fence) to be sucked into a maze of electric fencing containing four female figures placed on large crates (destined for Sydney? London?) . They are marked "Fragile" hand written on white tailoring tape. At the centre is a wooden guard's hut (festooned outside and inside with quotes like: "The guard sat on my cactus, the cactus died" and "I was hijacked"). His empty smart shoes are stuffed with paper. An old battered crutch simultaneously symbolises his absence, presence and our reliance on him to keep us safe.

His only true weapon as he (personified by Simphiwe Sekhute) walks around this fortress of fear (armed with a torch, a radio and a baton) is fortitude. At one point he becomes one of us seated in the auditorium providing an ironic subtext to the projected e-mails, from disgruntled homeowners, and the sung text.

A constant refrain in the song and image cycle (intercut with a giant video of white washing blowing in the wind, an animated version of the static shroud-like female garments which border the stage) are the Zulu words "We are like this".

Trumpeter Thabo Mashishi, on the lighting deck, plays a requiem, a strangulated last post, for an unravelling society. Xoli Norman's survival jazz seeps through the succinctly metaphoric design ruptures and vocal eruptions.

The lit white garments (which leave violent burn marks on the floor), and the static bodies, are trapped in an unsettling hyper-lit translucence. We are all in a jail of our own making.

Our saviour, the street security guard climbs a shaky steel tower, the lighthouse the singers plead for to dispel the darkness in our hearts. But the real heroes and beacons of intellectual and emotional light are the visionary artists.