Hair defines Us - wait read on..

So a couple of weeks ago (when I wrote this it was weeks, now its months due to my attachment to procrastination) I was invited to watch a dance performance at the UCT dance school. The performance was on hair.

Hair?

Yup, hair.

I was awfully interested in hearing this notion out. We were all seated and it began -The journey to understanding why on earth anyone would base an entire performance on hair.

I must admit I smiled a little when I went to the bathroom just before it began and looked at mine. What an absolute mess!

The show began with an explanation of how the initiative started. It was a collaboration between UCT students and Jikeleza dance school (based in an underprivileged area and therefore the students were from the same background)

The lady who trained them got them to speak about their feelings related to hair and got them to get in touch with the way they felt about hair.

When they began dancing I was, naturally, trying to understand what they were trying to say about how they felt or what they were trying to portray. It was more difficult than anticipated. To penetrate one’s thoughts is hard enough and to try and make sense of what their movement meant; more so.

There was a question and answer session at the end of it all where all the girls got to answer questions from the audience. I love this concept. It made me feel closer to the dancers and made me feel like a part of the goings on which I really liked.

This decision revealed other things about the girls. Most of the girls from the townships had a very difficult time expressing themselves. It was almost as though they wanted to be invisible so said as little as possible.

There were a handful of girls that had a chance to speak as part of the performance and one of the girls was blonde. She explained how irritating it was that people would sum up her level of intelligence based merely on her hair colour. I was astonished to learn this as I had previously walked around with the thought that “blond girls have it easy” when in fact it was the opposite when it came to the professional environment. So my question was what advantages she gained from her hair colour (There had to be some). This young lady I posed the question to was very opinionated and intelligent and didn’t actually get to a point where she said that she benefits until the very end where she said sometimes she uses her femininity.

Her femininity.

I have that too.

This seemingly light-hearted performance turned out to be of much more importance and dispelled some preconceptions we had about each other’s hair. (And in a strange way our cultures and backgrounds)

We should have more of such gatherings. The quicker we dispel untruths about each other the better equipped we are to fight intolerance and bridge the seemingly insurmountable differences of race, creed and culture.