BOOM! ONTO THE rudimentary set dominated with brown paper explodes a young man in a war helmet (Mathews Rantsoma), manning a paper aeroplane. He’s making sums that no doubt involve geography, mathematics, aviation and pilotry. Matters of consequence, you understand. The theatrical opening of the version of The […]
THE YEAR, SO far, has been fraught with broken dreams and unfair realities. We’ve lost people we’ve loved. And jobs we’ve relied on. And when you look at people going about their daily lives, they seem to be going through the motions, rather than injecting possibility into whatever […]
WHEN YOU ENTER the theatre, you might be full of frissons of excitement contingent on the promises of Fire and Ice, the name of this double bill danced by Joburg Ballet. As the works unfold, you might feel oddly let down. At best, the ice you will experience […]
COMPLETE WITH FEATHERS and upside down books, disabled dancers and movement evocative of ancient African dance traditions, to say nothing of their own, Moving Into Dance Mophatong presented itself on Dance Umbrella this year, with due aplomb and an earnest attempt at a snap shot of life, the […]
THERE’S SOMETHING EMINENTLY satisfying in dividing a work into four disparate parts and premising beauty around it. Vivaldi did it with the four seasons, creating great poetry out of a pure love of the idiosyncrasies of nature. Jayesperi Moopen does something similar in her collaboration of dancers associated […]
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 […]
HEADLINED BY INTERNATIONALLY celebrated works, the new solo pieces on Wits 969’s mixed dance bill were overshadowed, but it was fantastic to see Moving Into Dance Mophatong (MIDM) on the Wits festival’s agenda and platform. The programme comprised Oscar Buthelezi’s celebrated Road, a two-hander with Muzi Shili, which recently […]
They stand in a stripped bare John Kani theatre, which allows your eye to rest on and explore the architecture that has been witness to so much drama over decades. Surrounded by more than 20 plastic crates, some apples and a couple of swaths of material, these four […]
Mixed programmes in Dance Umbrella always hold that frisson of possibility and that lucky packet threat that is about how the works on the programme relate to one another, as well as what you are left with at the end of the evening. Sadly the wretched acoustics in […]
Gogo. These two syllables, under Gcina Mhlophe’s pen in the classic South African play Have You Seen Zandile?, embrace everything that a loving, hard working grandmother is about: Vulnerable, pugnacious when necessary, and above all, capable of real love. On stage 28 years ago this astonishingly fine work […]
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