Category: Dance

The world in a hoop

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 […]

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 […]