Memory and Legacy Meet as JOMBA! opens its first Digital Festival
Opening Night Speech by Artistic Director for JOMBA! Dr. Lliane Loots
At this moment, tonight — at the beginning of our 22nd JOMBA! festival — amid a world in the grip of a pandemic, with everyone desperately looking forward to a time beyond COVID-19, a time when we have the anti-virus, a time when we can safely dance with each other, a time to safely embrace … I am going to take this moment to instead look back and to walk back into memory.
We are often taught not to trust memory. We are told that spending too much time in the past makes us nostalgic for a history that is remembered without the turmoil and trial of the present.
Memory, we are taught, is for the weak, for those who do not live in the present ‘now’ and for those who cannot imagine a future. Progress, we are taught by our father anvils of capital, is about looking forward. The forward of comfort, of ease, of privilege and simply the forward of more (having more and being more) …
Tonight, I claim author Toni Morrison’s re-vision of memory when she talks about her effort — in her own artistic work, her writing — to substitute and rely on memory instead of history, even contemporary history. She argues that as a Black woman she cannot — and indeed should not — trust recorded history to give her insight into who she is. As such personal memory becomes a political act of revising the grand narratives of our histories, of patriarchy, of race and of who “belongs.”
For us, as art and dance makers and as cultural workers, to journey into this imaginative terrain, memory becomes our map and our metaphor for a very active process of re-creation and of becoming. Memory is active; it is doing. As Toni Morrison says:
History versus memory, and memory versus memory-lessness. Re-memory as in re-collecting and remembering as in re-assembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past.
For a dancer, memory sits on and in the body. Our re-membering and re-assembling happens in the politics of our bodies moving and narrating embodied, somatic and personal “her-stories”. For dance, memory is an act of liminal defiance against histories told and re-told by the narrow, headfirst progression to one version of our future.
JOMBA! 2020 has arrived this year when the steep learning curve of our current zeitgeist has asked us to re-imagine this place (and space) of memory. As we shelter in place, and while our bodies can no longer touch in either studio or on stage (certainly still here in South Africa), JOMBA! has decided to offer a different kind of engagement with memory.
We have curated seven distinct platforms for our digital festival and all of them, in some way or another, look back into what Toni Morrison calls a “re-assembling (of) the members of the body.”
Very seldom in the ambit of contemporary dance (certainly in Africa), are choreographers afforded space to go back, re-visit and sit again with past work. In our endless survival proclivity, we are forced to constantly make new work to access new funds. Time is not given to re-remember and re-visit older danced memories. Deeply intimate danced narratives are left behind as we are forced to move forward to the next big thing. JOMBA!, now in its 22nd year, has taken a mindful step back into re-membering. We have invited nine key choreographers and dance companies who have been seminal to our festival’s 21-year history to share dance work in an act of memory.
We sit, in our LEGACY PLATFORM, looking back at pivotal contemporary dance works that require us to value the politics of a re-versioned return home — of valuing the memory of lineage and legacy.
I think, for example, of Gregory Maqoma’s “EXIT/EXIST” that journeys back to his own intimate “re-assembling of … family” (to use Toni Morrison’s words) in a work that returns to his ancestral past to re-interpret the complexities of his (and our) contemporary world. Maqoma reconfigures memory.
I think, for example, of Germaine Acogny’s solo “Somewhere at the beginning” danced at age 73 — a memory of a woman, an African and a dancer’s beginning …
In our CONVERSATIONS PLATFORM, we have set up space to engage four globally significant dancemakers whose work — socially, culturally and artistically — is looking forward but only by virtue of the memories of a self-reflection that allow multiple ways of thinking about the politics of the “now.”
o South Africa and France’s Vincent Mantsoe’s tradition and heritage fuse with the technology of filmmaking
o Kenya’s Ondiege Matthew creates an embodied politics in locked down Nairobi
o Switzerland’s Jürg Koch uses his own dancing memories to create a digital dance engagement that values the archive of remembrance
And,
o South Africa’s Themba Mbuli, traces male family legacies to premier a new dance film at JOMBA!
At a time in our history in South Africa when dance is collapsing and artists are literally starving, and in the absence of any sustained coherent governmental support of our sector (at either a regional or national level), JOMBA! remains deeply gratified to have offered commissions to nine local KZN-based dance makers whose digital dance offerings will be screened tonight and available for viewing on our JOMBA! website throughout the festival.
I take this moment to honour these amazing nine Durban and Pietermaritzburg-based artists who have fought so hard to make the conceptual leap from stage to screen and to have created the intimate and terrifyingly beautiful work you will watch tonight.
All of these nine works delve into the ‘intimacies of isolations’ that is the existential grind of living in a time of COVID; they have fused personal memory with survival and the short films they have produced are brave and daring.
Finally, tonight, I claim, the vision of a self-named Third-World Feminist, India’s Chandra Mohanty in her eloquent ruminations on the state of global feminist struggles.
She argues that while North/South and rich/poor divides and the specificities of localised histories make it almost impossible for women to talk of a global sisterhood, what she does offer is the intriguing concept of a transitory “imagined community” that for a moment in time shares a “common context of struggle.”[1]
Tonight, across all sorts of divides that include North/South and East/West, that include race, gender, class, disability, sexuality … and all the intersections of identity — I am humbled by JOMBA!’s meaningful temporary community of dance makers, dance audiences, dance writers, and arts practitioners who share with me a common context of struggle that is a dedicated space (at this time and as a welcome holding space) to keep dance alive in our hearts, our imaginations and — importantly — alive in our re-visions and memories.
I welcome to our artistic 2020 JOMBA! ‘imagined community’,
o Chicago’s DEEPLY ROOTED DANCE THEATER
o New Orleans’ BODY ART DANCE COMPANY
o The Netherlands’ INTRODANS
o India’s Anita Ratnam
o Durban’s Musa Hlatshwayo
o Nigeria’s Adedayo Liadi
o Senegal’s Germaine Acogny
o South Africa and Germany’s Robyn Orlin
o Johannesburg’s Gregory Maqoma and Vuyani Dance Theatre
o Kenya’s Ondeige Matthew
o Switzerland’s Jürg Koch
o South Africa and France’s Vincent Mantsoe
o Cape Town’s Themba Mbuli
o I welcome our USA DANCE ON SCREEN curators and filmmakers who have shared their work with us,
o I welcome Val Adamson whose retrospective digital exhibition of 21 years of sublime dance photography for JOMBA!, is the very memory that binds our “re-assembling of the body”,
o I welcome dance writers and the JOMBA! KHULUMA team from London, Chicago and Durban
I also wish to thank a team of people who sit with me and who have made me begin to love technology (no small thing) and who have become my new neighbourhood.
· I begin by thanking Ismail Mahomed, the new director of the Centre for Creative Arts. I thank him for immeasurable support, for new avenues and pathways around this neighbourhood, but mostly for his intense kindness.
· I acknowledge the CCA team who have helped get JOMBA! here tonight, especially Yenzi Ndaba.
· I continue to thank the University of KwaZulu-Natal and our College of Humanities for having the vision to support and nurture the Centre for Creative Arts.
· I thank Wesley Maherry, Dhesan Gounden and Mahomed Sheik for being the technical gurus that have made a digital delivery for JOMBA! possible.
· I thank Sharlene Versveld, whose media and publicity campaign has supported the global reach of this festival. I want to acknowledge her passion and ethics.
· I thank Clare Craighead for her careful leadership of the JOMBA! KHULUMA blog and writing residency.
· I thank David Tatanelo April, Smangaliso Ngwenya and Tiny Mungwe for being so caring in their adjudications of the JOMBA! DIGITAL FRINGE
And finally, a really huge (and continued) thank you to the U.S. embassy here in South Africa and especially the regional U.S. Consulate in Durban for being our partners for JOMBA! 2020 and for also being mindful of the need to go back into the intersections and memories of alternate and artistic “re-assembling of … the population of the past” (to quote Toni Morrison again).
I end tonight with the words of Arundhati Roy from an essay she wrote at the beginning of India’s COVID lock down and whose words, I believe, speak to our own continuingly significant struggle for authentic memory that is not simply a history remembered by dominant anesthetising culture. She says:
Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink … Nothing could be worse than a return to normality … We can choose to … [drag] the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can [learn to walk(or dance?) again] lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.[2]
May DIGITAL JOMBA! 2020, remind you of what we need to fight for: for artists, dancers and choreographers who carry our memories.
THANK YOU!
[1] Mohanty, C., Russo, A. & Torres. L. Eds. 1991. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
[2] Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’ Copyright © Arundhati Roy 2020
