South African dancer Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe performs solo for over an hour. It isn't just this stamina that makes him remarkable, but the physical and imaginative distance he goes. Mantsoe dances as though he is in a state of possession, during which he opens himself up to huge, turbulent visions.
The most dense and varied of his three pieces is Phokwane, "a spiritual tribute". Within its 14-minute stretch, a cast of characters and emotional states passes through his mild face and smooth body with arresting speed. Sometimes he is lecturing and muttering like a wise old grandma, sometimes his stance is concentrated into a single emotion, so that he looks like some ancestral icon of triumph or grief.
Alongside this intensely human stuff there is a sharp sense of place. Mantsoe dances with unusual, unselfconscious freedom, and his moves switch with easy grace to the supple, swinging lope of a big animal, or the swooping lines of a bird. Sometimes, in the flickering speed of a gesture or the deep languor of a pose, we just sense dry wind and heat.
Mantsoe's vocabulary is clearly grounded in his native dance traditions, with a richly oiled articulation of torso, pelvis and shoulders unique to African dance. He is clearly trained in western modern dance too. Yet there is no sense of willed stylistic fusion here, no stitched-together borrowings. Mantsoe's steps come out of his own vision with a directness that makes you think of William Blake.
In the other two works, Barena ("king") and Motswa Hole ("a person from far away"), he focuses more on a single character, yet there is the same sense of the dance expanding into uncharted terrain. In the former, he uses three props - a robe, a carved stave and a stool - as symbols of power, but there is a quality of anguish and isolation in his moves that says something ancient and terrible about leadership. By contrast, his final work portrays a raggedy, comic stranger, a man with wild and deviant stories to tell. When it's finished, we realise that the most remarkable thing about Mantsoe is the fact that even though we have been watching him for so long, we have no sense of who he is. We sense his surprising gravitas (he is only just 30), but at the same time we know nothing about his natural manner or personality. It's a feat of transformation that is sometimes close to genius.
