The fourth annual JOMBA! MASIHAMBISANE DIALOGUES, hosted by the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience, set out to engage scholarship, pedagogy, and practices into negotiating the intersections (easy and uneasy) of tradition, culture, memory, hybridity, and contested identities in contemporary dance making, performance, and scholarship. With the title ‘(re)turn to the drum’, we wanted to provoke discussion with/ by/ on contemporary dance and its makers about how ideas of culture and tradition are being – and could be -negotiated and reimagined.
In this 4th annual JOMBA! MASIHAMBISANE series of dialogues we were interested in engaging the above myriad ideas and provocations and were especially interested in: Critical discussions in dance studies that engage/problematise definitions and debates of meaning within terms like tradition, culture, hybridity, and contested identities; Critical discussion/analysis of dancers and choreographers whose work; bridges/engages/confronts tradition, culture and the contemporary world; Critical dance engagement with feminist, decolonial and postcolonial challenges to idea of hybridity and cultural exchanges; How diasporic contemporary dance practices engage ideas of cultural appropriation, belonging and identity in performance making; and Critical discussion of, and by, dancers and choreographers using traditional spirituality and spiritual practices to negotiate/engage/confront contemporary ways of being.
by Dr Mbongeni N. Mtshali
EKUBUYELENI ESIGUBHENI ISINGENISO 
by Dr Mbongeni N. Mtshali (isiZulu translation by Lisa Goldstone)
Dancing Indigenous Philosophy: Key Concepts in African Contemporary Dance
by Rainy Demerson
Trilogia Antropofagica and the Turn of the Cannibal Body
by Lara Barzon
The Cannibal Praxis: Reimagining the Dancing Body Through Anthropophagy
by Alexandra Gonçalves Dias
The Streets are (H)Ours: Negotiating Time and Ownership in the Realm of Dance as a Ritual Practice
by Tatenda Kanengoni
Dancing Instruments – In Conversation with Looted oBjeCts
by Claude Jansen and Fabrice Mazliah
Breaking the Colonial Legacy: A Disruptive Approach to Contemporary Dance in ‘Hatched Ensemble’
by Kristi-Leigh Gresse
‘Stepping In Situ’ | An Ancestral Improvisational Movement Practice
by Francesca Matthys
by Saranya Devan
Social Media as a Catalyst of African Dance Practice
by Onalenna Sellwane
“The choreographed politics of intimacies”
With COVID and the digital move to offer dance (and dance festivals) via on-line platforms and digital spaces, one of the results has been an upsurge of deeply intimate dance and screen dance work. This colloquium took as provocation the (revised) words of Mexican poet and scholar Luis Vicente de Aguinaga that “even though every kind of politics needs a public square to exist, the politics of [dance] takes place in an intimate square”. The seeming collapse of public and private, and the mostly private homebound consumption of dance in digital spaces, provided an interesting and significant terrain to interrogate (amongst other factors like race and gender), Africa’s digital divides and what it means for African dance makers to engage the ‘politics of intimacy’ within digital dance spaces. The colloquium thus sought to engage the ‘intimacies’ of new ways of imaging/consuming/producing the creation of dance work for digital spaces that also – ironically and concurrently – have global reach. This is also set against the rise of gender -based violence during national COVID lock downs, and the ongoing understanding that private spaces (the intimacies of ‘home’) consistently remain a battle ground for many women (and women artists).
The colloquium set out to explore/interrogate:
a. how political, economic, social, cultural and technological forces are (re)shaping the meanings of intimacy in dance making in Africa (and the African Diaspora) in the recent wake of COVID-19.
b. past and present African/African Diaspora histories of live dance work that has set up shifted boundaries around ‘intimacy’ whether this has been through re-imagined performance spaces, audience engagements, choreographic process and delivery, and the actual narratives of the performance.
Dr. Lliane Loots
Artistic Director and Curator:
JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience
