Directors: Mark Fleishman and Alfred Hinkel
Design: Michael Mitchell
Lighting Design: Paul Abrams
Music: Jane Rademeyer/James Webb
Performed by the Jazzart Company
“Water is the first child of nature. This is what our parents used to say in the evening, because water contains everything, and nothing is visible. It is water that holds men. If you spend three days without drinking, you will die.”
(Words spoken by an old Warma peasant in the village of Thiou, Mali)
The fifth collaboration between the Jazzart Dance Theatre and Magnet Theatre. In past productions we used improvisation to generate dance material, which we have then refined, and set and repeated in exactly the same way each performance. In this way the dancers were integrally involved in the making of the dance. In this production we took improvisation a step further, bringing it directly into the performance arena itself. Cold Waters/Thirsty Souls is a lively interplay between structure and improvisation;between form and freedom.
“… profound and provocative performance theatre piece… this is dance theatre the way it’s meant to be. Disturbing and disjunctive. No time to sleep while others weep.”
Gael Reagon, Cape Times
“Cold Waters/Thirsty Souls steers away from the literal in favour of a mindscape impregnated with symbolism; freely associated with poverty, violence, education, gender, identity, sustenance, survival and healing. Those two seasoned craftsmen, Fleishman and Hinkel, deconstruct iconic images while creating pungently poetic metaphors”
Adrienne Sichel, The Sunday Independent
(Magnet Theatre/Jazzart Dance Theatre) Main Theatre Artscape, Cape Town. 2000
