Welcome to 13 days of JOMBA!

The 24^th JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience is about to kick start its first live festival since 2019. With the excitement of opening theatres and the slow ease out of lock down, JOMBA! 2022 offers dance fans a treat of 13 days of world class contemporary dance that will see both local and international dance makers converging on Durban. We are hosting artists from Mozambique, Switzerland, Réunion Island, India and of course the very best that South Africa has to offer. This 24^th edition offers a powerhouse of performances, workshops, panel discussions, virtual screen dance and a very welcome return of the JOMBA! youth dance platforms that continue to support the growth of Durban’s own young dancing communities.

The curatorial provocation of this 24^th annual JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience is “the (im)possibility of home” where we have set out, through both live and digital performances, workshops and artistic encounters, to interrogate a series of dance offerings that negotiate heritage, culture, nostalgia, and identity, and which explore a sense of belonging and how this persists, changes, and transforms through time – and what a time (both local and global) for this moment. In curating this year’s festival we have invited dance makers to reimagine their – and our – relationship with ideas of belonging and what constitutes ‘home’ at this particular moment in history. The 24^th JOMBA! is honouring artists who, through their work, generate a new sense of belonging that questions, Where is home? Who decides? And, importantly, What are the possibilities for an artistic practice like dance written on, in, and with the body – to engage in creating new spaces of both personal, artistic and political belonging?

I hope you will join me and the CCA team back in the theatre as we celebrate, what for dancers and performing artists, is their home – the theatre!