Performers from South Africa share a stage with choirs in each of the cities the show visits.

In Broken Chord, choreographer Gregory Maqoma, four singers from South Africa, and 16 members of Vancouver Chamber Choir tell the story of the African Native Choir's visit to the West. DanceHouse presents the show at Vancouver Playhouse Feb. 23-25. Photo by lolovasco.com /DanceHouse

Broken Chord

When: Feb. 23-25

Where: Vancouver Playhouse, 600 Hamilton St., Vancouver

Tickets: From $35 at dancehouse.ca

From 1891 through 1893, a choir from South Africa performed in Britain, Canada, and America. The 16-member African Native Choir consisted of missionary-educated men, women, and children. On a mission to raise funds for a technical school back home, they performed in traditional dress and combined English hymns and operatic choruses with traditional African songs.

Broken Chord tells the story of this anomalous expedition through music, dance and narrative.

For the show, which has toured Spain, Germany, Italy, and is going to France before coming to Vancouver for its Canadian premiere via DanceHouse, 16 members of the Vancouver Chamber Choir will join four vocalists from South Africa onstage.

Throughout the piece, South African choreographer/dancer Gregory Maqoma performs.

“On one hand, he plays the role of the chaperone,” musical director Thuthuka Sibisi said.

“That was our starting point. But we quickly realized that the character he is playing wants to be the white Westerner, he wants to present himself as classy, well-spoken, articulate, and well-versed in Englishness. So there are these moments throughout the dance where, finding himself on the side of the quartet, we see him almost spasming out of his blackness to play a character playing up to a type of whiteness. There’s almost a twitch in his gesture. And I think that speaks to the psychology of the split that he’s constantly trying to play.”

Broken Chord has its origins in the discovery of archival material, including the original program that the choir had sung for the Queen in London in 1891, by Renée Mussai.

Mussai, the senior curator at London-based arts charity Autograph ABP, then teamed up with Sibisi to combine the material with sound for an installation in Johannesburg. Maqoma, filming a documentary nearby, stumbled across the installation, and began an impromptu dance.

“Only at the last moment did he look up to see who had made it,” Sibisi said. “And he saw my name and we were already working together on another project. And he was like, ‘Well, I heard what you did, I loved it. Can we talk about turning this into a dance piece?’”

Sibisi and Maqoma eventually landed on a format that features performers from South Africa sharing a stage with choirs in each of the cities the show visits.

“That was a way to put a friction onstage, or at least make it more palpable,” Sibisi said. “The singers would question what the quartet is doing because linguistically, they sing different languages.”

Collaborating with a new choir in each city is no simple task. Beyond the logistics of preparing, mostly virtually, with the local vocalists, the performance pits them to some extent against the visitors. Choir members are called upon to get into the heads of people who carried the prejudices of their time.

“Especially in the beginning of the piece, there’s this contestation of space between the quartet and the singers. There’s a desire for them to claim a space back and the chorus pushes back. And in that friction, both parties needing to step out of themselves and put on a character. The psychology of the piece, getting people to understand themselves versus the character they’re playing, and how to invest themselves without losing themselves in the piece, is quite tricky.”

The show includes some dialogue, but Sibisi says that it’s not there to create a narrative.

“We’ve tried to make the work as porous as possible. What is problematic about referencing the archive and trying to perform the archive is potentially becoming didactic or pointing fingers. At no point does the work try to convict somebody. Rather, it invites people into the conversation. What we’ve tried to do is have the discourse come from an Afrocentric perspective. Because this is a story from Africa about Africans, it was important for us to have that perspective be what leads us to whatever resolution we think and hope we get to.”

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