IT’S RELATIVELY EASY to mesmerise an audience, with shiny objects and surprising gestures, but what does it take to hold them transfixed? In Off Balance, Mlindeli Zondi and Jack Moloi present a work about being black in a white world, that is rich in cynicism, sprinkled with hard-edged humour and has an undercurrent of the sinister, but it is Zondi’s mercurial movement and Moloi’s dexterity on keyboards that will haunt you. And hold you. It’s got to do with the give and take of the two performers, the dark jokes they point like weapons at the performance industry and their flippant yet astute construction of the world and all its contents with a hoop, fiercely beautiful language and nuggets of truths in the way things work. It ends its short season at space.com, in the confines of the Joburg Theatre on the weekend.

Think of a mashing together of Heinrich Böll’s Clown with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to create a dialogue that has a well-known nursery rhyme as its hilarious refrain, which holds the ability to raise goosebumps as it shifts eerily off key, yet remains recognisable. Think of the use of a keyboard accompaniment to a therapist’s assessment of your sanity. Think of all the hypocrisies and broken dreams that can constitute the fabric of a life, contained within 60 minutes of storytelling. The work has the pared down quality of pieces of the ilk of South African classic Woza Albert, only its content takes jibes at the complexity of the art world in the context of an international circus with all its frills and thrills. Do you dance with the platitudes and sell your values upstream? Do you hold onto your values and lose credence and a living? Does the stuff you drink and the other stuff you smoke or sniff give you courage or cause the bottom of your equilibrium to fall out?

It’s a work that is a little rough round the edges in terms of its denouement and its legibility, but it is one of those gems onstage, the likes of which the multiple catastrophes of the Covid-19 pandemic and loadshedding put brakes on, since 2019. Off Balance is something you need to experience, to restore your faith in the fact that this industry is live and kicking, thinking and arguing, as it always has been.

• Off Balance is directed by Tebogo Machaba and performed by Jack Moloi and Mlindeli Zondi. Written by Mlindeli Zondi, it features creative input by Jack Moloi (composer); Lotanang Makoti (dramaturge); Jabulile Mangqangwane (lighting); and Daniel Buckland (choreography), is stage managed by Jabulile Mangqangwane and performs at space.com in the Joburg Theatre complex in Braamfontein, until 10 March 2024.