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This third annual JOMBA! MASIHAMBISANE DIALOGUES, hosted in the 25th anniversary year of the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience, and in partnership with the UKRI-funded AFRICAN DANCE DISABILITY NETWORK, set out to engage scholarship, pedagogy and practices into integrated dance as an embodied form with a particular African focus, without being exclusive.
We began by asking what is included in integrated dance? Perhaps we automatically think of disability when we encounter this term, but in this colloquium, we asked whether we could, should and even have broadened our approaches to integrated dance in more intersectional ways? And what would this mean practically and conceptually for disability dance itself as practice, pedagogy and research?
“If we want this (integrated dance) to have a bigger impact, first of all we need to work on ourselves, everyone, … to have a better way of seeing things because when we create that acceptance inside us, then things will start to make sense to us, and we will start to see beauty in everything” (Tebandeke, Joseph at Sibikwa BODY MOVES integrated dance festival documentary, October 2022)
Integrated Dance Practices Moving Centres – ‘Here be dragons’ 
by Prof. Yvette Hutchison
Izikhungo Zokuhambisa Imikhuba Yomdanso Edidiyelwe – ‘Nawa inkanyamba’
by Prof. Yvette Hutchison (isiZulu translation by Lisa Goldstone)
Hearing Difference: a Gift to Applied Theatre
by Zhiling Guo
by Dr. Jessi Parrott
Twisted and strange: dancing from the inside out
by Dr. Gerard M Samuel
Insider Without: uncovering dynamics of power and privilege in disability dance
by Sydney Erlikh M.S.E.d.
by Bernice Gordon
By Hannah Ma
INTERMEDIALITY AND THE ARCHIVE
Paper 1: Kristina Johnstone: “Mapping artistic research as part of a decolonial choreographic praxis: The creation of an online cartography”
Paper 2: Gerard M Samuel & Ebrahim Medell: Death and the Merrim
Paper 3: Robyn Denny & Mamela Nyamza (collaborating artists): “an arch(iv)ing praxis: Hatched 2015 || 2007-2018/2015-2022”
“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
