Dance Umbrella 2017 is done and dusted, and like virtually every other Dance Umbrella for the past 29 years, it featured the good, the bad and the ugly, and insights into the ‘lucky packet’ syndrome, central to any arts festival, where you’re never sure of the pickings of […]
THE SCENE IS set for something utterly extraordinary. Quietude pervades. There’s a tight row of wooden crosses, standing plunged into the ground. And the riffs of sound filter through the space, subtly at first and then with richer resonance. You’re on high alert. You don’t know what might […]
WHEN SOMETHING SO unutterably beautiful crosses your path, at first you feel awestruck into silence, and once you have caught your breath and gathered your energies, it takes time before you are capable of reflecting on the intensity and pull of that beauty. This is what you experience […]
AS YOU SIT down and focus on the internal space created by the vast vertical diaphanous screens that are central to this piece, you might feel that you’re in the wrong seat. And as Corps unfolds, with the play of shadow with dance, video footage with photographic image, […]
SELDOM DO YOU find yourself turning to the bible in an attempt to access what you have just seen in a dance festival context. But this is most certainly where the perplexing, abstract but highly skilled De-Apart-Hate by Mamela Nyamza, which debuts in Johannesburg for the Dance Umbrella, […]
SOMETHING QUITE TERRIFYING happens when you find yourself among people you don’t know, being aggressively instructed in a language you don’t understand: You just obey. You do what other people are doing. You become frightened to step out of line. Frightened that the guards’ attention will become focused […]
THERE’S A DENSE stillness articulated in the tough and unselfconscious photographs of performer Oupa Sibeko in his solo exhibition iQhawe. But as you look, you realise there is considerably more to these heroic images, cast pristinely onto a white background, which situate the artist in traditional reeds or nakedly. […]
HE SITS AT the piano and caresses it into life, like a god. Like a demon. Like a godly demon or a demonic god. Sometimes he looks maniacal and deformed at other times, like a sprite, who could at any moment leap the constraints of gravity and fly away. […]
THE YEAR’S BEEN grim, callous and ugly to most of us. We’ve lost people we’ve loved. And jobs we’ve relied on. War’s been apparent all over the place. As has disappointment in those who lead us. What better way to herald its closure than to indulge in easily […]
CONTEMPORARY DANCE HAS a reputation for being self-indulgent, inaccessible and boring. Very occasionally however, you do get a real opportunity to see something extraordinary. And that occasion is often so rare, in a season so brief that you have to act quickly. Impact 1 is exactly what dance should […]
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