STREETCORNER FILMS, Dec 6, 2012
-snip-
From a comment in that video's discussion thread: "Track name: Beyonce - Best Thing I Never Had (Bhekzin Terris Mix)" **** Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post showcases three YouTube videos and two article excerpts about South Africa's Pantsula dancing.
In addition to learning about the history of that dance, I'm particularly interested in noticing how Pantsula fashions changed over time.
The Addendum to this post presents the full quote about the etymology of the word tsotsi, as that word was mentioned in Article Excerpt #2 in connection with Pantsulas (Pantsula dancers).
The content of this post is presented for historical, cultural, entertainment, aesthetic purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to Jonathan Evans and all those who are quoted in this post.
-snip-
This post is part of an ongoing pancocojams series on South Africa's Pantsula dances.
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2021/11/definition-of-pantsula-esquire-magazine.html for a 2021 pancocojams post entitled "Definition Of "Pantsula" & Esquire Magazine 2018 Excerpt About The Fashions Worn By South Africa's Pantsula Dancers".
****
SHOWCASE VIDEO #2: Pantsula Dnace - Red Devils
SHOWCASE VIDEO #3: MASPARA PANTSULA IN SOWETO 2021
Koosking Productions & KK-TV Films,
ARTICLE EXCERPT #1
From https://www.fashionstudiesjournal.org/3-exhibition-reviews-3/2017/4/2/pantsula-4-lyf-popular-dance-and-fashion-in-johannesburg PANTSULA 4 LYF: Popular Dance and Fashion in Johannesburg by Rachel Kimmard, Fowler Museum at UCLA (January 29 - May 7, 2017)
"The Fowler Museum at UCLA, part of UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture, focuses on global arts and cultures, with the museum’s largest exhibition showcasing a collection of work emerging from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas. PANTSULA 4 LYF, organized by Assistant Curator of African Arts, Erica P. Jones, explores a contemporary dance culture born in the townships of black South Africa. Jones conceived the exhibition as“a meditation on the everyday experiences of township life, though the themes have changed.”
Spread across the first floor of the museum and encircling a small outdoor courtyard that houses a dry fountain and potted plants, Saunders’ photographs pop from the gallery’s white walls. Each wall contains a theme: Hola Malume: The Old Guard; Lacing Up: Fashion; Pantsula Today; and Movement. Unframed portraits are mounted on stiff backing and hang on clips from thin metal chords—like photographs drying in a darkroom. This presentation emphasizes the portraits as a part of a whole body of work rather than a collection of individual photographs, as the cables draw lines around the gallery walls, leading the viewer through a linear narrative.
The text on the first wall provides a brief history of pantsula, positioning the scene as a cultural youth movement that has endured and evolved with the times since the 1970s. The first photographs on view introduce the so-called "Old Guard," or men who performed pantsula in the ‘80s and ‘90s. These men wear dark colors and mix fedoras, leather jackets, and dress shoes into their ensembles. Their outfits stand out since they are the only subjects of the exhibition who do not wear the contemporary pantsula look.
The title of the second wall, Lacing Up: Fashion, introduces an exploration into the dress practices associated with pantsula. “The styles worn by pantsulas…are signifiers of a dancer’s place within the township pantsula subculture. Pantsula fashion has always been an important marker of identity and resistance.” The text breaks down the uniform into a few key and highly specific elements: “Dickies trousers, Converse All Star sneakers, and a cap with a small brim.” The crews all wear the same unique outfit for performances. Both men and women participate in pantsula, although the subjects of the exhibit are mostly male. According to the text, the gender-neutral looks shown in PANTSULA 4 LYF are unique to the past 25 years, “prior to the 1990s women would dress in distinctly feminine attire.” From its inception, pantsula fashion has looked to American styles for inspiration and the contemporary is no exception. To American eyes, the pantsula practice of wearing work wear (clothing designed to be utilitarian) looks particularly fresh. Pantsula is not the first subculture to reinterpret work wear with new meaning, but with a focus on color and coordination it may be the most vibrant.
The third wall, Pantsula Today, is the strongest collection of photographs on view. Meeting the different crews through group portraits conveys the visual power of pantsula fashion as it’s meant to be viewed—as a coordinated group uniform. Capturing the dancers posed with their crews or performing in front of an audience, these photographs feel more like documentary work rather than street style fashion photography. The act of performance comes into focus in a set capturing the crews dancing for the community. An image of the crew Rozary Productions from Dukathole, shows the trio of dancers in matching outfits standing high above their audience on industrial structures used as platforms. The men wear white gloves, holding their hands to the sky while a group of small children look up, watching from below.
The final wall, Movement, focuses on the dance style that characterizes pantsula. Taking a cue from Eadweard Muybridge, Saunders shows two contact sheets capturing an individual dancer’s movements frame by frame. The wall text explains that pantsula is a method of storytelling, describing the choreography itself as composed of “elements of daily life in Johannesburg’s townships.” Gestures like raising an arm to hail a bus or jumping from a moving train to a platform are exaggerated into choreography.
Saunders’ compositions utilize setting only as background, relegating visual focus to his subjects and their clothing. As described on his website, “Saunders' work typically conveys an upbeat energy. He doesn't so much ignore surrounding political and social problems, as relegate them to the background, against which his subjects' boundless creativity generates an irrepressible optimism.”
Yet, with any venture into anthropology, the relationship of
documentarian to subject is easily problematic. In this case, Chris Saunders is
a white South African who was born in Johannesburg. Other than geography, the
black South Africans he photographs grew up in an entirely different world.
While his highly-stylized images could be interpreted as replicating an
outsider’s gaze, the mediums he has chosen could also be construed as a bridge
for exploring two sides of the Apartheid legacy. While Saunders depicts
pantsula culture as young and bright, the body of work begs the question: What
would we see from a photographer within the townships?"
****
ARTICLE EXCERPT #2
From https://pan-african-music.com/en/pantsula-5-faces-shaping-the-south-african-scene-today/ Pantsula: 5 faces shaping the South African scene today
by Jacques Denis, May 31, 2018
"Soulistic Fusion, Soweto Skeleton Movers, Pantsula
Intellectuals, Tembisa Revolution, Via Broom, Rozary Productions… Within
the Joburg area alone, there are at least a hundred or so pantsula crews. The
dancers of these crews count in the thousands, and that’s without including
those based based in Durban, Cape Town, the Free State or Botswana… On every
street corner, in every town, this dance, rooted in the everyday, has set the
beat of daily life for the past couple of decades. The pantsula dancer can
dismantle his body, or juggle his hat with the finesse of a footballer.
Footwork always reigns supreme. Whistling is also one of the myriad modes of
expression of this colorfully demonstrative dance.
Over the generations, the central theme of pantsula has remained the same: transform the smallest gestures of everyday life into choreography that’s both realistic and theatrical. Everything from hiring a taxi, to playing dice, to watching out for and fleeing from police are all pretext for transforming the mundane and the demoralizing into beautiful movement. The transformation is so effective that one forgets just how much skill is needed to master the mechanics..
The history of the pantsula merges with that of Sophiatown. It’s a big, mixed neighborhood of Johannesburg, a hip spot, where writers, jive and jazz musicians and gangsters used to rub shoulders. When Sophiatown was razed to the ground in 1955 (to be renamed “Triumph” by the Apartheid regime, of all things…), blacks had to move to other neighborhoods.
“When pantsula was born it was more of a subculture that also had to do with fashion. It was young people in the 1960s and 1970s who put on British and American designer clothes, Italian shoes, and kept up with the trends in Sophiatown,” says Daniela Goeller, art historian and associate researcher at the University of Paris 1. While researching the subject, Goeller, who has travelled and researched extensively in South Africa, created “Impilo Mapantsula,” a platform that brings together choreographers and encourages a more just representation of pantsula amongst institutions. “It’s mostly a youth phenomenon,” explains Goeller. “It’s a movement that has been growing since the 1980s. Dance companies have been created and therefore so have choreographies, whereas before it was mainly a solo dance. For fifteen years, these companies and choreographies have exported themselves, most notably in France, where organizations that are ahead of the game in terms of trends, like Radio Nova, transmit and relay this urban dance.”
Half a century later, after Apartheid, the sartorial swagger
of pantsula still holds its sway. Dancers display a style that is entirely
South African; there are codes to respect. It’s reminiscent of the Zoot
Suiters, the handsome Latino kids who were the talk of the town in the 1940s,
on the US’s West Coast, and whose ultimate paragon was Kid Creole. Whether it’s
a coincidence or not, the word “tsotsi,”
a local adaptation of the word “Zoot Suit,” means “little criminal” in
slang, and tsotsitaal is a vernacular mixture of all the languages that make
up the townships. In this singularly diverse dance, Goeller suggests “a
phenomenon of creolization based on South African identity.”
If the parallel with hip-hop, which has also had its own
history in South Africa, is self-evident, the unique character of this dance is
equally as obvious. (Editor’s note: the mixed genre of pantsula-hip hop is
called isbhujwa, which phonetically is “is bourgeois.”) In its oeuvre, pantsula
has integrated traces of tribal dances, like basotho, along with dance
reminiscent of early twentieth-century cabarets, Harlem Renaissance’s cherished
rendition of the lindy hop, the gumboot (a dance born at the bottom of the
Gauteng mines), the sublime dance solos of 1950s Hollywood, and even kung-fu
moves… The list of pantsula’s style influences is long, but it’s precisely what
makes it so unique. Through all the artifice, pantsula tells the story of the
continued harsh reality of South African townships today.”…
-snip-
This article continues with a focus on a few pantsula dancers.
The group names written in italics were given that way in that article. The Editor's note is written by that article's Editor and not by the Pancocojams Editor.
****
ADDENDUM
https://dsae.co.za/entry/tsotsi/e07359#:~:text=This%20type%20of%20dress%20became,for%20stove%2Dpipe%20trousers).
"tsotsi, noun
Forms: Also tsotsie.
Origin: Origin
uncertain; widely believed to be a Sotho corruption of zoot suit, see
quotations 1956, 1962, and 1980; but C.T. Msimang (1987, in S. Afr. Jrnl of
Afr. Langs Vol.7 No.3, p.82) writes ‘The origin of the term tsotsi is not
known...Although the term has a Sotho phonemic structure, it is not a Sotho
lexical item’. See also quotations 1938.
1. a. in historical contexts. Especially during the 1940s
and 1950s, a young black gangster or hoodlum who affected a particular style of
language and flashy dress; pantsula sense 1 b. b. Loosely, a (young) black
urban criminal. c. Used affectionately or contemptuously: a bad (young) man.
Also attributive, and transferred sense. See also boy sense 2 a, location boy
(location sense 3 c). Cf. amalaita, clever, comtsotsi, ducktail, sheila sense
2, skolly, spoiler.
[1938 Star 1 June 16Alleged to be members of the ‘Ishotsi’
gang, with aims of robbing and murdering natives.]
[1938 Rand Daily Mail 3 June 6The accused were members of
the ‘Ishotsi’ gang,..composed for the specific purpose of robbery.]
1949 Cape Argus 20 July 8 (heading)Tsotsi gangs who hate
Bantu students.
1949 Cape Times 10 Sept. 8The ‘Tsotsi’ may be distinguished
by his exceedingly narrow trousers which hardly reach his shoes, or else by his
‘zoot suit’.
1950 Report of Commission to Enquire into Acts of Violence
Committed by Natives at Krugersdorp (UG47–1950) in L.F. Freed Crime in S. Afr.
(1963) 130The shebeen queens resort to devious means to evade police detection,
such as..calling upon the tsotsi gangs for protection.
1954 Star in L.F. Freed Crime in S. Afr. (1963) 78Young men
roaming the city streets..selling liquor to natives, smoking dagga, and
accosting passers-by,..the White tsotsis of Johannesburg...European hooligans,
known to the police as ‘White tsotsis’, terrorize people in the central area.
1956 T. Huddleston Naught for your Comfort
81‘Tsotsi’—..familiar enough to have become a term of abuse when applied by a
European to an educated African, a term of contempt tinged with fear when used
by one African boy of another...Every country in its large cities has its
‘cosh-boys’, its ‘wise-guys’, its ‘gangsters,’ its ‘Teddys’. And the ‘tsotsi,’
the real genuine ‘tsotsi,’ is all of these...The origin of the name is
interesting, for it is a corruption of ‘Zoot Suit,’ and the ‘tsotsi,’ like the
Teddy-boy, is supposedly characterised by the cut of his clothes.
1959 L. Longmore Dispossessed 317Ntsotsi is a word
denotating the notorious young thieves, murderers and terrorists, so commonly
found in the locations, going around in well-organized gangs with a terminology
of their own and whose main weapon is a large knife. I have used the now
generally accepted form of the word: tsotsi.
1962 W.S. Manqupu in Star 22 Feb. 14The very name ‘tsotsi’
had its birth as a result of a film, shown in 1946..the all Negro ‘Stormy
Weather,’ in which the cast wore stovepipe trousers..and..wide-brimmed hats.
This type of dress became the vogue on the Reef, and the Sotho gave these
youngsters the name ‘tsotsis’ (‘tsotsi’ being a Sotho word for stove-pipe
trousers).
1963 L.F. Freed Crime in S. Afr. 126A ‘tsotsi’ is one who
follows ‘the way of life of the sharp trousers’, that is, trousers with legs
narrowed at the bottom.
1963 Wilson & Mafeje Langa 14Within the category of
townsmen an important distinction is made between the tsotsi set, who are
violent and boisterous, and the respectable, ‘decent people’, of which the
educated section forms the middle class.
1976 West & Morris Abantu 179Crime is a major problem,
and Soweto can claim the dubious distinction of being one of the most dangerous
places in the entire country, where gangs and the delinquent tsotsis
(hooligans) flourish.
1977 P.C. Venter Soweto 146Men’s fashions saw the birth of a
new, sleeker pair of trousers. The legs were tapered like stovepipes, tight in
the crotch and even tighter around the ankles. In black townships and shanty
towns the male youths immediately accepted the new fashion, and called it
tsotsi trousers.
1980 D.B. Coplan Urbanization of African Performing Arts.
350The term tsotsi..was an urban African pronunciation of ‘zoot suit’. It
indicated their orientation toward American popular culture, relative economic
success, and flashy dress as a symbol of urban sophistication.
1980 D.B. Coplan Urbanization of African Performing Arts.
442Tsotsi..suggested a clever, street-wise petty criminal or hustler, flashily
dressed in urban American fashion. Today it applies broadly to any young,
potentially violent African urban criminal.
1984 N.S. Ndebele in Staffrider Vol.6 No.1, 45Tsotsi
violence.
1990 Diversions Vol.1 No.6, 8Avoid a crooks tour — watch out
for overseas tsotsies.
1990 M. Kentridge Unofficial War 66The comtsotsis..preyed on
commuters and mugged workers on pay-day much like tsotsis (gangsters)...The
difference was that they explained that their actions formed part of a
political strategy.
1993 Daily Dispatch 14 Oct. 1The PAC last night distanced
itself from the violence..and blamed it on ‘tsotsi’ (criminal) elements.
1993 [see lost generation].
2. combination
tsotsi-taal /-tɑːl/, also with initial capital [Afrikaans
taal language], flaaitaal. Also attributive.
Note:
The name ‘tsotsi-taal’ is seen as derogatory by some, the
terms flaaitaal or isicamtho being preferred. Tsotsi-taal originated in the
townships around Johannesburg, becoming particularly well-established in the
1950s. Spoken at first mainly by criminals, partly as a means of avoiding being
understood by others within earshot, it has since come to be used more widely,
especially by young people, among whom it has more recently come to be called
‘isicamtho’ or ‘scamtho’.
[1951 Drum Nov. 10To speak broken Afrikaans is one of the
methods by which tsotsis identify each other, but each group has its own common
vocabulary in the presence of strangers.]
Show more
1994 H. Masekela on TV1, 16 Nov. (People of South)I have
been thinking of making an album in tsotsi-taal and calling it ‘Heita-daar’." "
****
Thanks for visiting pancocojams.
Visitor comments are welcome.
