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 […]
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 […]
WHEN YOU HOLD a match to something flammable, you will get an explosion. But it need not be a destructive one: Pantsula dancer Ayanda Nondlwana aka “Fire Starter” or “Ace” was that kind of flammable, in the dance sphere. All the people who touched his life enabled him […]
WHEN YOU KNOW, from the first few phrases of a book, that you are in good and powerful storytelling hands, the rest of the text sings beyond the confines of its pages. This is the kind of experience you can anticipate in Catherine Cole’s foray into South African […]
PETITE YET FEISTY, full of passion and dance knowledge, Maxine Denys held the flame for classical ballet with an innate sense of dynamite. But more than just dance technique, she was a woman of wit and charisma, who not only gave Sleeping Beauty’s Carabosse the verve she requires, […]
Shorter than most, and the youngest of all, Portia Lebohang Mashigo came into the South African dance fraternity when she was just 14. Armed with an inherent sense of wisdom and focus, she grew up in the industry to be a giant of a dance professional. She died […]
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 […]
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 […]
TRIBUTE TO PULE KGARATSI, RESEARCHED BY LERATO NTILI. A humble mentor, beautiful dancing talent and gifted educator, Pule Kgaratsi was one of the formative dancers of Moving Into Dance Mophatong. He was killed in a shoot-out South of Johannesburg on 30 July 2017. He was 51. Orphaned at […]
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 […]
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