Superstars slightly deflated

By: Sacha Knox

In a first for South Africa, Introdans (Holland) delivered a repertoire of technically brilliant neo-classical ballet performances to the stage of the 15th Jomba! Contemporary Dance Experience. This repertoire consisted of: ‘Polish Pieces’ by Hans van Manen, ‘Evening Songs’ by Jiří Kylián, ‘Pas de Danse’ by Mats Ek, ‘Anaphase’ by Ohad Naharin, and ‘Sinfonia India’ by Nacho Duato. There was a real sense of excitement as the audience swelled into the Sneddon; smartly dressed couples, parents with children, groups of women beautifully adorned, their hair in extravagant swoops. I could not help but feel a sense of the magic of the ballet; nostalgia for some of my first theatre experiences, a smudge of that awe able to immediately dissipate stubborn-faced- frown for fancy dress.  

An exciting space of invention

The fringe is an exciting space. In optics, the term ‘fringe’ points to the visible that is a product of oscillations and interferences- that which is seen carries with it the marks of motion, destabilises clean correlations, creates a critical confusion, prompts the confrontation of contradictions. Appropriately, the Jomba! Fringe provides a place for critical experimentation, for tentative voices to be heard, for the abandonment of momentums of monoculture, for choreographers to kaleidoscopically cut their teeth on other movements. The 15th Jomba! Contemporary Dance Experience embodied this through rich and varied offerings, spilling from stage in creation of inadvertently unselfconscious interactions between performers and audience members- spontaneous reactions produced in an atmosphere of loosened playfulness rather than one of stuffy reverence.  Invented (and more, and less) were; subtleties and spectacles, supplements and symposiums, sorrows and celebrations, monsters, monstrations, products and processes, ticks, technologies, banalities, florescences, embarrassments.

We could have gone on forever

By: Sacha Knox

Sometimes in life, we are fortunate enough to be seized, to be shaken, to be thoroughly rearranged. Fana Tshabalala’s INDUMBA was the fever from Vladislavić’s ‘Double Negative’: “Flaring with light, leaking colour from the raw edges of my hands and feet, I lay in the bath until my temperature broke. At the worst, the water was boiling around me, frothing over the lip of the bath. Afterwards I felt over exposed and paper thin…My hands were dusted with flour: I couldn’t bear the pressure of one fingertip on another”.