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Category: Dance

Present absences and men of war

DO YOU REMEMBER the cultural imperative in South Africa? The thing that you had to see, at all costs, whether it was an opera or an exhibition, a performance or an event? Kentridge’s The Head and the Load evokes this artistic urgency among South Africans, that is at […]

Ghosts in the soil

THE GROUND THAT you think is firm enough to hold you and your history and values may not be as solid or kind to you as you think. Or hope. It’s a concatenation of ghosts, of the detritus of dead buried there and of the messy issues associated […]

Our minister, left feeling cold

ALONGSIDE AN ALL-ABIDING fear of social interaction on every conceivable level, the coronavirus pandemic has brought us – particularly us in the arts industries – dire concerns about the very income that keeps body and soul together. On 15 January 2021, South Africa’s current minister of sports, arts […]

A cupboard full of ideology

DANCE REVIEW: THEMBA MBULI’S MANMADE. WHAT IS AN item of clothing in this world? A swatch of fabric stitched and cut to fit a body? A thing to simply cover your nakedness? A repository of fashion values? Or a thing to define you in a specific way, fraught […]

Soil in my suitcase

DANCE REVIEW: ABOMHLABA(THI). SOMETHING REALLY MAGICAL happens when you watch the give and take of three young bodies threading and knotting yarns between each other and the African soil that covers the world in Musa Hlatshwayo’s dance work Abomhlaba(thi), on this year’s Jomba Dance Festival, hosted by the […]