You don’t come away complacent from this work. Is it assaultative? Absolutely. Relatable? 100%. You feel broken, body and soul as you emerge from it. You laugh with recognition at the dark tropes and you sweat with a personal dread at where this work may go, as you experience it.
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.
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 […]
In a moment, he takes an audience who is laughing and chatting loudly, and renders it speechless, quietly weeping and praying. This is the starting point of Albert Silindokuhle Ibokwe Khoza’s Red Femicycle, which has enjoyed a few platforms in Gauteng this year. An essay on the scourge […]
WHAT ARE THE basic parameters that inform a festival of contemporary dance? Should there be a gatekeeper who assesses wannabe shows on the gig and plays god, in his or her ability to give a hopeful group of applicants the ‘yay’ or ‘nay’? And who is that gatekeeper? […]
HE WAS MORE than just a dancer, choreographer and artistic director. Lucky Kele was an interpreter of dance dreams, a man with a real passion for making things happen in the dance fraternity, and for pushing dance boundaries. Known by so many as ‘King’, Kele tragically passed away […]
BOOKS AND THEIR inflammable contents, the perennially absent South African father, and unleashing the wrath of decolonised feminist fury are the issues central to the works staged by Themba Mbuli in Dance Umbrella, earlier this month. Mbuli’s topics are hot and relevant and the presentation is clear and […]
SOMETIMES A WORK reaches your sensibilities in an ineffable way, giving voice to your most secret and unuttered notions of the rawness of loss, love and letting go. Sometimes that work can touch all those nerves and succeed in being so supremely beautiful and wistfully unhinged that you […]
THE TROUBLING TRUTHS of the prevalence of the selfie and the way in which contemporary society is so deeply focused on its cell phones is something that has been pondered by thinkers and hacks alike. Social media seems to be here to stay, and it’s pulling our values […]
LET US BOMBARD our audience with flashing lights, a small dark venue simmering with the residue of stage smoke as they come in, and bits and bobs of sampled sound, thrown at them with such aggression that the context is illegible and the synapses of their brains forget […]
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