Digital Shaman, Film
Venue: VFringe, NAF Website
Next screening: 24/7 During the festival
Review
By Andile Mbesa
Digital Shaman explores the place of the ‘African’ in a world slowly eroded by Western technology. The film’s creator, Thato Nkwe, shoulders multiple roles. This responsibility of the multi-faceted shaper – documenting, writing, directing, choreographing, composing, performing, and editing – will be relatable to many and at the same time tells a deeply personal story. The one-person performance contrasts and combines traditional African and modern elements, chronicling a society in transition.
In this 13-minute, one-performer Afro-contemporary dance film, Nkwe juxtaposes and mixes traditional and modern elements in depicting a fracturing. The imagery is hypnotic.This reviewer was reminded of the aesthetics of Hip Hop videos, such as those produced by Kendrick Lamar as the Shaman, in the fashion of mid-2000s urban streetwear, moves with a fast, funk-infused pace. This new figure contrasts jarringly with the projected African savannah landscape that’s pixelated and plagued by retro glitches. The effect is profound in the way that it conveys, with a gut-churning terror, a world and an identity splintering into a digital wasteland. The basic premise of the film is of a bionic Shaman who inserts a USB to communicate with technology, attempting to reboot his spiritual healings in order to transfer them into the digital age. All this amounts to are feelings of inadequacy.
The performance is flawlessly harmonised; when the music stutters, the dancer stutters in synchrony, uninterrupted connection blending man and machine. One of the deeper questions at the centre of the narrative asks the viewer to contemplate whether we are learning to dance in partnership with artificial intelligence, or if it is in fact altering our culture’s music in fundamentally irreversible ways.
This struggle to remain relevant is bleak, echoing a society in a struggle to stave off obsoletion. The dystopian message mirrors a reality that is unfolding currently. Digital Shaman confronts the complexity facing many African individuals: do we relinquish our traditions in order to blend in, or instead reinterpret our knowledge systems, remanufacturing technologies as a vehicle to transform?
