JOMBA! MASIHAMBISANE DIALOGUES #5

The fifth annual JOMBA! MASIHAMBISANE DIALOGUES, hosted by the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience, sets out to engage scholarship, pedagogy, and practices that interrogate how dance and dance-making responds to, battles with, and navigates the current unfolding socio- and geo-politics of border/lands.  We engage ideas of ‘border’ in two ways; firstly (and more overtly), as a material terrain that we stop at, step over, and come up against. Secondly, we engage borders as metaphors for practices that enact diffraction and contemplate “what the map cuts up, the story cuts across” (Slembrouck, 2003). We note how many contemporary scholars draw on Martin Heidegger, who argued that “a boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing” (1971, 152-153).

This colloquium invites scholars, practitioners, and artist-researchers to explore how an embodied performance form like dance (and its cognate practices) respond to, and revise ideas of border/lands; real or imagined – manifest between nation-states, between North and South, between fluid ideas of genders, between performances of tradition and modernity, between colonial and the post-/ decolonial narratives, sifting binaries between human and post-humanism, between perceptions of ability and disability.

And further, how dance becomes a practice of worlding where ‘worlding’ is the idea of creating and experiencing different realities or worlds shaped by our relationships, bodies, and the power structures around us. In the liminality of dance and dance-making (especially in the Global South and for those who identify as ‘translocal’), this colloquium begins to ask how the implicit non-neutrality of ‘worlding’ offers a conceptual and pragmatic way to ‘border cross’ and to revisit ideas of dance as activism.