JOMBA!
2023 Contemporary Dance Experience champions inclusive dance forms
The University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Creative Arts’ JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience celebrated its 25th anniversary this year. JOMBA! 2023 offered dance fans a treat of 13 days of world class contemporary dance that saw local and international dance makers converge in Durban. From 29 August to 10 September, JOMBA! hosted artists from Mozambique, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Madagascar, Uganda, Romania, Germany, UK, Brazil and of course the very best of South African talent.
The duration of the dance experience offered performances, workshops, panel discussions and virtual screen dance. At this festival, dance makers were invited to reimagine their – and our – relationship with ideas of belonging (and arriving) and our varying (in)tangible heritages.
This year’s JOMBA! 2023 opening featured Mamela Nyamza’s Hatched Ensemble as Nyamza was this year’s JOMBA! 2023 Legacy Artist. Hatched Ensemble powerfully conveys challenging issues of tradition. It incorporates classical ballet with contemporary dance, along with opera and African instrumental sounds which deconstruct the binaries of traditional African dance forms and Western balletic norms.
Hatched Ensemble is motivated by Nyamza’s highly acclaimed solo work “Hatched” (2007), an autobiographical work in which she reflects on her life as a black, queer dancer.
“Hatched Ensemble speaks to anyone who has felt conflicted about their own identity and where they belong in the status quo,” said Nyamza. The dance piece relays a message to the audience on the need to free oneself from oppression and “hatch out” in your true identity.
Provocatively titled, Archiving History and Memory: 25 Years of the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience, edited by Tammy Ballantyne Webber, the book places emphasis on offering a poetic user-friendly archive of the 25 years of JOMBA!’s history and legacy.
“The book is especially significant in remembering African creative histories in a time when forgotten Southern-based archives are being politicised in decolonial frameworks,” says Dr Lliane Loots, Curator and Artistic Director of JOMBA!. “This book is offered as an archival project that holds an activist agenda and fights for carefully and methodically curated creative African histories to be remembered and honoured.”
The book is available to purchase, contact
tammyb@artslink.co.za at The Ar(t)chive for sales and information.
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