It acknowledges and celebrates the flow of gravity and of fabric and the use of the fingers, hair and the expressions of the face in the material. And with all the sturm and drang of excesses and morals, values and torment, the dancers are consistently deliciously light on their feet.
Maqoma’s work has a tendency to leave you trembling in anguish. It’s an earth shattering experience you might not be able to rationally find the vocabulary to describe. How could it be possible to say so much with just music and movement? Genesis may take you deeper you believe possible.
Featuring phenomenal performances by Alice Findlay, Oratile Manamela, Nicola Shapiro and Ketsia Velaphi, it takes on the repetitive nature of a boarding school ethos, punctuated by gossip and politics, lessons which are both rote-based and morally confusing, and the drugs, sex and other illegal experiments conducted in the school’s interstices.
Life, death, betrayal and the heaviness of loss were brought onstage to Johannesburg high school students in the form of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Armed with pure use of period language, a deep understanding of purpose and meaning and a rich clarity of narrative, they were perfect.
Ziaphora Dakile, Kitty Moepang and Barileng Malebye take hold of this script which forces them into the personas of many: old and young, black and white, good and evil, with sophisticated empathy. Vying between English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa, it uses idioms that you understand from your intestines, if not grammatically.
You must see ‘The Piano Lesson’ because of Lerato Mvelase as Berniece and Warren Masemola as Lymon. Masemola, all limbs and voice, carries his character, an outsider to the unfolding family tale, with engaging lightness. Mvelase plays a woman with a deep sense of injustice she’s not afraid to use.
With her impish gap-toothed grin and her sprite-like existence onstage and in the interstices of the stories she told, fearless and impetuous dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo leaves a brilliant legacy that radically shifted an understanding of what dance from South Africa can and should be, anywhere in the world.
WHAT WOULD YOU do if you were lucky enough find one of five golden tickets that will offer you access to the heart of the best made chocolate in all the land? The premise of Roald Dahl’s classic tale, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is one of wonder […]
AS THE TRADITIONAL heavy velvet curtains part and the sheer magic of Grant Knottenbelt’s set, with all its bells and whistles, cobbled pathways and Italian provincial signs appear, a hush that signifies young people’s awareness of the imminence of magic, descends over the audience. But the intake of […]
IT WAS THE late Alan Crump, Chairman of the National Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown, during the 1990s, who used to quip about the so-called “blue rinse and boiling sweet brigade”, who the festival organisers had to take seriously because they represented a money backbone of the […]
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