Part of the “What is a home?” series

Andries Botha on “The Dance”

 

The Dance is part of the epic work “What is a Home?” it is the one work that more intimately explores the conflictual relationship of the masculine and the feminine. This axiomatic oppositional energy, one which is often internalized within each individual but is also externalized in the drama of our heterosexual lives and our continual search for balance and a sense of purpose and place in the world.

 

The sources of influence in this work are the cartoon characters that I was so fond of and those which formed the most important part of my own literary heritage. A closer examination of the work will discover that there is an implosion of gender type. Although there is the outward cladding of masculine and feminine, the figurative types are almost inter-gender.

 

The Dance makes unashamed reference to the Afrikaans dance called “binneboud”. It is in a way a formalized courtship with generally leads nowhere. The movements, gesture, clothing all suggest a sort of self conscious hyper stereo type and the rest, of course, is left to the imagination.

 

Andries Botha, February 2012