From the pandemic we still intersect
By Mhlengi Ngcobo
The 30 August 2022 marked the 24th anniversary of the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience. After two years of Covid-conditions and two fully digital festivals, JOMBA! Returned live, and festival curator Dr. Lliane Loots in her opening night speech offered a reminder of how art teaches us that we are all connected through community.
On offer to open this year’s festival is the international Hominal/Xaba. In a contemporary context, Hominal/Xaba reads as a decolonial provocation — exploring the intersection of two choreographers, their cultures and also their deconstruction of dance form and style.
Nelisiwe Xaba and Marie-Caroline Hominal, from South Africa and Switzerland respectively, present their work, simply titled Hominal/Xaba, in colorful body-revealing costumes. The dance piece was staged at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre, University of KwaZulu-Natal Howard College in Durban. The stage floor was full of multi-colored crossing woolen threads and there were also hanging wooden crosses wrapped with African printed fabric/cloth.
Xaba and Hominal find connection through the threads from corner to corner and side to side. Watching them made me think about how we are connected as people, with our different skin-colors, races, genders, cultures we can still find connection — Ubuntu…
These colorful woolen threads created an attractive image on the floor, an image which showed the beauty of connections. The stage offered a tapestry of connections, creating a web of intersections. However these confluences made it difficult for them to make their way into the center, even with the stretching of their bodies. To me the difficulty of not being able to move to the center and their eventual literal cutting of the connections is a huge provocation related to the past two years of Covid and our inability to work in our theatre spaces or rehearsal ones. Staying in isolation, cutting connections …but they remained connected.
The hanging fabrics were later dropped, creating this alluring visual image for the dancers to travel through and around, intersecting at times and at others moving through and past each other. At the heart of the work, the dancers meet centre stage, and offer a flippant engagement with various popular and cultural dance styles danced to the likes of Tron’s song titled “Captions” and Girl’s Generation’s “Gee”. These are offered alongside a local Gqom track titled “Grandaganda” by Babes Wodumo ft Mampintsha and Mandanon. Both dancers managed cheeky renditions of the various styles of dance performed, including Hip-hop to K-pop and Gqom. I appreciated that dancers of such high caliber are able to explore popular forms without belittleing them and that they too are able to poke fun at themselves.
All-in-all, Hominal/Xaba was an entanglement of provocations about culture, identity and dance technique. The intersections of the two choreographers are at the heart of the work. For me, it expresses a decolonial impulse that questions the very nature of dance, or, what can constitute dance… and, who gets to say.
JOMBA! runs until 11 September with the programme of events available online here: https://jomba.ukzn.ac.za/
