The following is by Myer Taub, who is producing a monthly guest column for ArtHeat. Thanks Myer, and enjoy.

Paul Grootboom’s Fourplay is a contemporary South African adaptation of Schnitzler’s nineteenth century European commentary on sexual mores and appetites called La Ronde; both are dramas, and both agitate in a circular narrative fashioned in-between the chorus of sexual deviates and the self. Grootboom’s more recent version which I happened to see at the Market Theatre is for the first hour splendidly brilliant as the play draws you into a malicious yet compelling dance of nostalgic tunes and cracked up street wisdom but it’s this wisdom that becomes lost when Grootboom’s own voice supersedes everything else and as you watch the dance, his clumsy, aggravating auteur-ship slips around the neck of the dance and pulls the brilliance down. The metaphor of the duo in the dance is one that I am repeatedly experiencing this (last) month in Gauteng/Joburg. I watch moments of sheer brilliance, experience it and yet somehow, something… that I want to and might call ‘not us enough’ combining poverty, arrogance, patriarchy, greed and stupidity are seemingly drawing Jo’burg back into a two horse carriage town; bringing the dance of the Extravaganza down. I realise this at the sublime US curated by Bettina Malcomess and Simon Njami–where visual artists and performance artists brilliantly project innovative work but are still to be faulted on because of laziness and lack of engagement with us, ourselves... so that I drunkenly proclaim (immediately) at the opening show: ‘it’s not us enough!’ I experience ‘not us enough’ on the streets as the jacarandas attempt to drown out the needy. I see it on the roads where taxis blockade every move by everyone else in order to move anywhere but nowhere. I spend some of Jewish New Year at my sisters and her family. She welcomes the entire family–the first time that everyone is spending the holidays together and she starts off the dinner sweetly expressing ‘how even in the storm we must learn to dance in the rain’. That is the best thought of the evening. It soon escalates into a diatribe of arguments around Palestine, Israel, the Goldstone Commission and that ‘terrible-terrible man’ Ronnie Kasrils. A week later, I am fasting. I choose to go to my late father’s synagogue in town, actually Doornfontien: a forgotten inner city suburb edging on the border with Ellis Park and the Ponte Towers. I walk there, rising early to get to the morning service. I walk through Parktown, Houghton, Yeoville and edges of Hilbrow to get there. Self consciously, a white man with a white prayer skull, walking through a sea of memory, a top soil of it–intermeshed with a sea of black people...walking too, backwards and forwards as if we are all dancing with notions of us along invisible trajectories of urgency. The Ari Synagogue is still closed on this particular day but alongside the almost Ottoman styled synagogue is a neighboring crèche once the Jewish nursery school. It offers me shelter off the streets while I wait for the synagogue to open. The crèche leader/teacher is originally from the Cape: Bel-air but has been in this---the ‘area’ for twenty years – she has the last bit of Jewish furniture from the last Jewish man who left the area. It is a lush green velvet sofa sunken in the middle sitting centre stage in her crèche. An early sunny morning glow fills the room as children play with plastic farm animals poured out of yellow buckets whilst the crèche leader from Belair speaks about the Jews and the area and faith and crime for about thirty minutes or so…I listen to her dance, I listen silently and wander if I am silent does this mean she is dancing alone. A few nights ago, I recount some of this tale to new and old friends at the Attic a trendy eatery with great food in Parkhurst; we’re on the street, celebrating the quality of pavement life that is food, and wine and chatter so extraordinary Joburg – pavement eating that evokes memories of Hilbrow, Rosebank, Yeoville and now Parkhurst. Much later, someone at the table has her handbag stolen along with her car keys, house keys and money but she can only think about her lip-gloss, she says as we wait for the AA to open her intensely vaulted, security-conscious car… The AA man called Oswald expertly opens the car as if he has done this a million times before…its an expert move, a dance with us and with the car, and alone. It is a swift hand movement, focusing on the wrist clasping a bit of wire and suddenly there is a click and the car door opens. There is rain brewing on the edges of the city, the air is hot also cold, and Ms. Lip Gloss says she is the happiest she has ever been now that her car is open and she can go home safely but her lip gloss and money are still missing. These are some of the binaries, multiplied lines on a triptych, rhizomes, opposites, them and us, all dancing.