Confrontation, empowerment and limitless exploration find a voice on JOMBA!’s Open Horizons programme
By Alexander Dale
JOMBA!’s Open Horizons (Short form) platform featured various works from across the African continent.
In SPOT, Kenyan artist Vincent Ochieng Owoko compels us to look at racism as an imposed construction, a prison which determines how we relate to one another. Like the clothes on our back, racism envelops us, layer after layer. The production dislocates time with a dynamic editing approach that sees the dancers move out of time. The simple yet confrontational choreography gives the work space to breathe and allows us to become fully enraptured by the confrontation of bodies. Owoko forces us to not only look at ourselves and each other but to think about what we see.
Stripped down to the basics, Trouble Inside by Judith Olivia Manantenasoa (Madagascar) puts the virtuosic body to the fore. With an engaging choreographic praxis that sees the body moulded into various shapes and contortions, the production reminds us of a pre-pandemic experience where there was nothing but the dancer and the viewer. A coexistence powerful enough to transcend boundaries, politics and bodies. A synergy to which we hope to return.
In their work, On This Day, [Em]bodied Creatives, a multidisciplinary collective of artists, document the consumption of art through viewing, listening and feeling as a choreographic exchange. At its essence, the production brings the painting, On a good day by Anico Mostert, to life through a clean and well-crafted contemporary choreography. This, combined with the exciting makeup worn by the performers, renders a dazzling performance that archives South African art through the timelessness of video. In today’s South Africa where artists have been abandoned to fend for themselves, [Em]bodied’s work is helping to secure our posterity.
Rhia Ryan’s Untitled glimpses into the mind of an artist perplexed by the inconsistency of the creative spirit. Framed by a stunning ocean vista, the waves turn back on themselves when faced with the confrontational stillness of the artist’s body. This keen editing approach continues throughout the work transposing moving bodies onto themselves to create multifaceted imagery rooted in an inexplicable creative energy. The artistic force at the root of Ryan’s work reaches its zenith when she appears to be lost in her own body, a violent and visceral moment which speaks to the precarity of nothingness that is faced by artists on a daily basis.
Fenya, winner of the Short Form programme, is a powerful collaboration between performer Kagiso Masinda and director Carrick Keating. With a stunning embrace of screendance as a union between technology and body, the work creates a divided dimension torn between Setswana pride and the contemporary impositions. In Masinda’s breathtaking performance of choreography, evolving out of domestic acts such as scrubbing, there is a consistent and brave challenge to the colonial ethnographic tradition which to this day has continued to burden the black femme body. Masinda fights this way of looking and its lopsided power dynamic through the simple act of looking back. Masinda claims her right as empowered subject and breaks the paralysing stare of colonialism by moving: she moves beyond the ‘either or’ life that has been presented to her, she moves into her power.
Smudge Screen’s Grain (second place in this category) journeys beyond the limits of the material world and like a grain of sand, exists beyond time and space. With a highly stylised visual aesthetic grounded in neutrality, the production revolves around a brilliant duet between Sasha Fourie and Tyra Petersen and is enclosed by an infinitely beautiful landscape of endless sand dunes and blues skies. Like the sand on which they dance, Fourie and Petersen melt into each other, their bodies extending the reach of the other and moving synchronously into limitlessness, beyond our mortal conceptions of time and space, us and them.
Whistles that scream and are unheard, burdened bodies collapsing into shadows, Kamogelo Molobye’s In the shadow of his fist (placed third in this category) is a starkly transgressive work that highlights the Gender-Based Violence crisis facing South Africa. Molobye choreographs a disturbing sense of intimacy through a variety of repeated close ups which zoom in on and capture the dissolution of the body in a state of violence. Shifting between unrelievable anxieties and paralysing agonies, Molobye conjures a creeping apocalypse lurking unchecked in the shadows of our lives. Molobye urges us to cast out the shadows and take action against the fists raised in violence, to look bravely into the darkness and see what stares back at us.
These presented artists not only demonstrate the power of screendance, but they challenge us with harsh realities, realities they dare us to confront.
