JOMBA! Female Forward Dance Residency 2025
Call Out for Durban Female Dancers
JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience, hosted by UKZN’s Centre for Creative Arts, invites Durban-based female dancers (ages 18–30) to apply for a 7-day residency led by Gaby Saranouffi. Aimed at developing young women in dance, the program runs from 25–31 August 2025, with final performances on 30 August. Applicants must have prior training and audition to qualify. This is a unique opportunity to grow professionally and perform at JOMBA! Forging Futures.
MASIHAMBISANE DIALOGUES
The 5th annual JOMBA! MASIHAMBISANE DIALOGUES, hosted by the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience, explores how dance engages with socio-political and geographical borders. The dialogues examine borders as physical boundaries and as metaphors for disruption and connection. This event fosters critical conversations around dance, scholarship, and pedagogy, highlighting how movement responds to and reflects shifting global landscapes, inspired by thinkers like Heidegger and the idea that boundaries can be sites of new beginnings.
Housed within the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s award-winning Centre for Creative Arts, the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience is South Africa’s longest running and most celebrated contemporary dance festival. It is amongst the leading cultural events on the African continent that attracts choreographers, dancers, artists, and audiences passionate about dance and live performance to the shores of Durban, South Africa.
The JOMBA! festival’s vision is to nurture, support and grow contemporary dance and the engagement with dance as a critical and important art form for dancers, choreographers, students, scholars, and researchers in South Africa, Africa and a broader global dance (and arts) community.
The JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience has four annual (and biennial) festival offerings:
- JOMBA! MASIHAMBISANE DIALOGUES (on-line: May)
- JOMBA! CONTEMPORARY DANCE EXPERIENCE (KZN: August & September)
- JOMBA! @ The Market Theatre (Johannesburg: September)
- JOMBA! ABILITY DANCE FESTIVAL AND COLLOQUIUM (KZN: every two years)
With multiple ways to engage, JOMBA!’s ever-growing offerings extend beyond live performances to free workshops, discussions, residencies and our celebrated online colloquium (the JOMBA! MASIHAMBISANE DIALOGUES) that promotes Southern based dance scholarship in inclusive ways.
Recognised for its artistic excellence and brave curation JOMBA! is led by founding artistic director and curator Dr Lliane Loots. Her passion and tenacity has steered the festival through its 26 years and ensured a resilience that provides a space for dances critical engagement with questions concerning fundamental human rights and social justice that advances human dignity. Loots is supported by assistant curator and JOMBA! project manager, Thobile Maphanga who’s deeply engaged love of the festival and her imbedded politics of centering Southern artistic and cultural spaces, has helped keep JOMBA! relevant and connected to the communities that is serves.
JOMBA! prides itself on its long-lasting relationships with its trusted partners and stakeholders; both local and international. With its focus on placing the artist at the centre of the festival, JOMBA! has become known as one of the best international dance festivals to perform at by artists around the globe. JOMBA! has successfully initiated and participated in various cultural exchanges supporting both arts and dance companies finding connections and onward tours.
As a living archive of South African (and African) contemporary dance, JOMBA!’s artistic excellence and social relevance continues to remind us of our ever-evolving social, cultural and political movements and pushes us to collectively envision a cultural future we are all proud to be a part of.
Welcome to our 26th JOMBA! festival and 13 days of incredible dance!
“finding our way home”
Set against a backdrop of both local and global political renegotiations of what it means to be human, to belong, to have a home, and to be a citizen of a country (and of a planet), against an occupied Gaza, a ravaged Ukraine, anti-foreigner right-wing political movements in Europe, a South African Government of National Unity that is so busy maneuvering for power, but who has said very little about unity within or economic freedom without… JOMBA! begins to ask what it means to “find our way home”. As a critical dance festival, we have curated a series of artistic encounters that question ideas of home, belonging and citizenship. We have invited dance works that ask us to relook at home as not just a physical space, but as a metaphoric and poetic space where we are either seeking to return, or to leave. We honour dance makers who will be bringing beauty, humour, pathos and politics to our stages and hearts, to audiences who come back again and again to support this work, and to our partners and funders who consistently ‘show up’ for us and make it all possible.
Our 26th festival features dancers and dance makers from all over South Africa, France, America, India, Japan, and Germany, as we offer dance enthusiasts a treat of 13 days of world-class contemporary dance that will see both local and international dance makers converging on Durban. This 26th edition offers a powerhouse of performances, workshops, panel discussions, and digital screen dance.
Our 26th JOMBA! is honouring artists who, through their work, generate a new sense of belonging that questions who we are at this moment in history. I hope you will join me and the CCA/JOMBA! team as we celebrate this incredible festival packed full of beauty and provocation – but mostly incredible dance!
Dr. Lliane Loots
Artistic Director / Curator:
Jomba! Contemporary Dance Experience
2022 JOMBA! Khuluma Digital
Pietermaritzburg Choreographer BreeH Cele’s work “uXinzelelo” wins pick of the JOMBA! Live Open Horizons Platform
JOMBA! DIGITAL OPEN HORIZONS PICK OF THE PLATFORM ANNOUNCED
Honouring Durban’s Wesley Maherry’s 15 years as Production and Technical Manager for UKZN’s Centre for Creative Arts and JOMBA!
uKhoiKhoi performs with legacy artist Robyn Orlin at JOMBA!
Dancers from Bangalore (India) for this year’s JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience
