the thud of a snowflake

Everything about Athi-Patra Ruga is larger than life. From his infectious laughter to his style of dress, right down to the way he lives his life – large and in charge. A seasoned agent provocateur, his very existence is performance art. A tireless and prolific creator, he is always working – even on holiday. He says it's because he likes what he does, “It seeps into every aspect of my life... and that requires a lot of putting out.” I ignore the (unintended?) double entendre glaring at me from that last statement.

His given name is “Athenkosi”, the meaning of which in isiXhosa – Ruga's vernacular language – is laden with sentiments of thankfulness and appreciation (it literally means “they say thank you”). An almost prophetic moniker given that he has for almost the entirety his professional career been bowing to thunderous, though sometimes bewildered, applause from appreciative audiences in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Berlin and New York.

“Make me famous!”, he says facetiously during our interview. But he already is. He recently performed Ilulwane – an audacious masterpiece involving twelve synchronised swimmers and a forty-five minute opera he co-composed with Spoek Mathambo, that deals with issues around traditional male circumcision – at the Long Street Baths in Cape Town. Both nights the venue was filled to capacity, with many turned away at the door after waiting for over an hour to gain entry.

Early in his career he participated in a residency at Scenographies Urbaines, in Kinshasa, DRC. While he was there, he was invited to perform at a popular Kinshasa night club – or rather his first character, Miss Congo, was invited to perform. It is unclear whether or not the organisers were familiar with his work at this point. Not one to back down from the opportunity to take his art to an audience that would otherwise never experience it, he accepted. The performance is captured in a fifteen-minute video recording featuring Miss Congo, clad in his trademark red kerchief and denims, gracefully poised atop a bar stool on a stage - a needle in one hand and a piece of tapestry fabric in the other. A mic stands at the ready directly in front of him, but all that is heard throughout the recording is the din made by club patrons gradually getting impatient with this man silently weaving tapestry in front of them. There was no applause that night. But Ruga is not easily dismayed, the man is intrepid.

He is often compared to fellow South African performance artist, Steven Cohen. A comparison that he feels honoured by – the first performance piece he ever saw was Cohen's Chandelier – but warns that a basic comparison is often the result of laziness, of not engaging with his work, which many reviewers have difficulty doing. I ask if he thinks comparisons are made because his work is difficult to review.

“Is it tough to review my work? Then, if so, let it be about your experience and no convoluted qualifications on the work.”

Close friend, Pamela Dlungwana – curator at Greatmore Studios in Cape Town – agrees with this statement. In discussion with her about how the Ilulwane performance seemed to go over people's heads, she had the following to say:

“It's a visual performance piece, not a theatre piece as the write-ups say. You have to divorce yourself from expectations and things will slot into place. None of the visuals we all have in mind about traditional male circumcision were used.”

It was Anthea Buys who once wrote that it is the “politics of context” that concern Ruga. This being diametrically opposed to the “context of politics” that seems to inform critical discourse around contemporary South African art. There is almost a desire for all activism to follow the same common theme as all other spheres of South African social activism. Ruga is concerned with challenging even that, using high camp in his presentation to make even the most evolved amongst us, including himself, ask “what is it for?”.

“I think it is clear that irreverence is a tool in my work and that includes camp. These tend to get to the point more. The point being an accessible one. Provocation works if you are gonna be dealing with a wall made up of staid notions of art. I am highly aware of that.”

This provocation is not limited only to his performance pieces. Having began his career as a fashion designer, he regularly returns to textiles as a medium of artistic expression. Though he laments the “transient and apolitical nature” of fashion, he renegotiates the use of clothing and textiles to subvert the dictum that governs the human body and how it should be presented. For some in the series of tapestries that formed part of his 2009 exhibit, ...Mister Floating Signifier And The Dead Boys, at Whatiftheworld Gallery in Cape Town, he took to male pornographic imagery as a basis for the final product. One of the tapestries features a man in what appears ostensibly to be women's garments: a gold-patterned black leotard (the artist's favourite garment, even for himself) worn over a black full-body bodysuit, and long pink gloves that reach up to his upper-arms. His blackened manhood is clearly visible over the gold pattern of the bodysuit, lending it an air of dissociation or dislocation from its owner. His eyes are also blackened out, but with a kind of violent strike-out that gives the impression that his identity has been taken from him without his consent. Very little of the work he has produced over the years remains unsold, proving that provocation pays.

Ilulwane, in particular, deals with a very contentious subject amongst Xhosa men. The name refers to a person who has either forgone the traditional circumcision route in favour of the western way, or someone who has suffered a botched traditional circumcision resulting in hospitalisation and, sometimes, castration. Either way, according to the Xhosa male paradigm he is “a man who is not a man”, as author Thando Mgqolozana puts it. He is looked down upon and occupies a no-man's land between boyhood and manhood. Ilulwane is also the Xhosa name for a bat – that ethereal winged creature who's existence is shrouded in such myth that it is neither earthly nor heavenly, but inhabits that unknown place in between or beyond.

When I ask him what his father, with whom he is very close, makes of his work, considering that black South African families are notoriously conservative, he tells me that his father is enormously proud, though they never really discuss the semantics of the work.

“My family is like any other South African family, we have this flabbergasting addiction to shock. And also they think 'As long as he's employed , as'khathali [we don't care]'. I think that my dad equates art making with activism sometimes. That puts pressure on me. But the funny thing is after he started hearing and seeing my work, he still is expecting an album launch soon from his 'performance artist son.'”

This might not be a farfetched expectation, considering his recent foray into music. For the soundtrack accompanying Illulwane, not only did he and Spoek Mathambo re-arrange and re-imagine Somagwaza – the song sung at traditional Xhosa circumcision ceremonies – but Ruga also lent his voice to the opera and the spoken word on the forty-five minute track. On the Cape Town party scene he is known as DJ Uncle's Touch.

Although each of his characters is birthed and killed off, he dreams of reviving them and bringing them together in a singular performance, to bring them together in conversation with each other.

“One day I will show them . Funny, Iluwane the performance is about that ascension to the other world. Ilulwane comes close to owning its own destiny by taking that task of killing characters. I think they exist all in the after life. Like Ilulwane's ancestors or stuff like that. It would be nice to have them in conversation. That idea haunts a lot of late.”

For now though, he is preparing himself for a variant performance of Ilulwane at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in July. He will also be performing Ilulwane shortly thereafter in Port Elizabeth “sans the swimmers but yet another kind of team”.

Beyond that, we have The Future White Women Of Azania to look forward to. Another epic performance-based project incorporating all the different media he is responsible for: print, video, craft etc. Will it still be dealing with body/sexuality/identity politics?

“Oh yes! more with intimacy. It is set on a prison island. Companionship is the right word.”

Given South Africa's history with a certain prison island, this new project is sure to ruffle some feathers. I, for one, cannot wait. In a country that is only now learning to speak honestly to itself, I sense a conversation that has long lurked in the shadows is about to be initiated.

[originally published some time in 2012 on www.thiis.co.za - a now defunct online mag, and a great loss - published in its entirety without any further edits]