Review: Breathing in mold and decay in Nelisiwe Xaba’s vRot at LAF

Nelisiwe Xaba’s vRot, was one of the opening performances at Live Art Festival (LAF) which opened last night, September 4 and runs until September 7, 2024 at Hiddingh Campus with performances, discussions, talks and lectures. Vrot is performance art on steroids. It revolted me and intrigued me. LAF is hosted by the ICA – Institute of Creative Arts at UCT. See https://humanities.uct.ac.za/ica/projects/ica-live-art-festival

We attended the opening evening of celebrations in a packed auditorium at Hiddingh Campus. It was wonderful to see so many people out there on a cold night in Cape Town. The rain has dissipated but it is still cold and it is great to see the hunger for performance in terms of the number of people at the opening. The opening performances sold out.

It is noted in the programme about vRot:  Xaba uses “mold and decay as a metaphor for corruption, and the impact this has. She highlights the processes of deterioration: mold and corruption that take place slowly and over time. As an artist, Xaba embraces deprecating humour as a coping mechanism. Through this work, they acknowledge that corruption extends beyond governments and permeates our entire society.  They contemplate too whether their work effectively reaches a broad public audience or is it confined to academic and art spheres?”

Entering the Arena Theatre at Hiddingh Campus, we were walked into the pong of rot. I heard people saying –“oh that smell… what is that smell – the smoke – I can’t breathe.”  It was the stink and purification of garbage dump with wine and beer and urine and the same with a bar or club after a party. People were covering their noses with their scarves, burying their faces in their laps, tucking into themselves.  There was smoke and it shrouded us – not in a good way. It was claustrophobic. It felt like one was walking in what I imagine a morgue feels like. It’s the smell of decay and decomposing stuff and it gets worse. It is revolting to be in vRot and Xaba is revolting against rot and decay around us. In the theatre space, she literally puts our face in it and jolts all the senses- smell, sound, visual. We cannot look away as we breath it in, with all our senses on alert.

The performance starts out with Xaba writhing under a spider web tent structure with a hole which could be a portal or could be a barrier to the mesh.  It is initially wistful with a voice-over: “You can’t catch me oh daddy; please let me be a tender entrepreneur Tera dactyl; a tera entrepreneur.” The spider web could be a womb, a birthing sapce. It could also be a trap – like animals are trapped,

For much of the performance Xaba is tethered underneath the mesh and then emerges from the web into the stink and pong – on the side of the web.  A man in a lab coat on the side, plays with dinky toys and food. He decapitates a Barbie, eats sushi, slugs down MacDonalds meals, Kentucky Fried Chicken and other fast food which stinks from the chemicals of processed food. Everything i beamed onto a screen so we can see what he is doing – like in a cooking show.  He slugs down a bottle of bubbly – and vomits it all on stage. It is the stench of fast food and its chemicals. He is regurgitating the toxicity of the food but at the same time forcing it down. The sound effects – with him puking, vomiting, gasping – the sound is like a body of expression in itself. And the smell is also a body of expression.  Like alchemy everything mixes and through the chemical process, blobs of mold set in. It is like being present in a science project. I could image maggots and flies arriving. Many of us were gagging – trying hard not to throw up. Can you imagine a mass regurgitating session in a theatre? People were chortling and laughing at the sounds and visuals- urggh – a release of horror through mirth and laughter, I guess. There were a few people who clearly could not stomach it and who walked out.

Xaba smears a substance which looks like yogurt and smells disgusting over they body and then feverishly and desperately pushes against a plastic screen and imprints they body on the plastic; pops  in and out of the holes in the plastic screen. Escaping or playing? There is a sense of how children play by imprinting their bodies with paint on surface, with a skeletal tracings of the body. It can be a lot of fun being covered in paint but the smell can make one feel sick.

As always Nelisiwe Xaba’s work is impeccably imaged, fabricated and performed. Her movement in the web/womb/trap is sublime and seductive. It is a dance of transfiguration, limbs articulate through the mesh, pushing, pulling, seeking. I was so mesmeried by the smell and sounds that I was distracted from the beautiful dance. I would like to see it again to focus on the dance.

The lighting and sound is brilliantly plotted. Each piece of the set in vRot is beautifully anchored and although there is ample regurgitated stuff and fluid, the plastic curtains screens the audience form the vomit. Theatre often carries trigger warnings to be aware of strobe lighting, for instance. Vrot perhaps needs a trigger warning to cover your nose or risk gagging in the smells and sound effects.

With this performance, vRot definitely “reaches a broad public audience”. This is unforgettable live art in every way. I think that the world is vrot at the moment so we can all relate to this hyper sensorial loading in vRot. There is so much going in that we just want to vomit and puke over. There are no words which suffice as to convey how we feel. Vrot evokes this brilliantly. Vrot is an unforgettable viscerally urgent piece of performance art.  

✳ Nelisiwe Xaba’s vRot, was one of the opening performances at Live Art Festival (LAF) which opened September 4 and runs until September 7, 2024. Pic by Mark Wessels.