The fifth annual JOMBA! MASIHAMBISANE DIALOGUES, hosted by the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience, set out to engage scholarship, pedagogy, and practices that interrogated how dance and dance-making responds to, battles with, and navigates the current unfolding socio- and geo-politics of border/lands. We engaged 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 engaged borders as metaphors for practices that enact diffraction and contemplate “what the map cuts up, the story cuts across” (Slembrouck, 2003). We noted 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 invited 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.
Festivals/ Festival Making as Choreographies of Border-Crossing and Worlding 
Panellists: Abd Al Hadi Abunahleh (Jordan), Orwa Nyrabia (Syria/Berlin), Dr Princess Sibanda (Zimbabwe/South Africa), and Kateryna Botanova (Ukraine/Switzerland).
Facilitation/Chair: Thobile Maphanga
Choreographies of The Climate Crisis: Engaging Environmental Borders
by Ochan Zechariah
by Dr Alan Parker
From Borderland to Third Space: Rethinking Deaf and Hearing Theatre as a Hybrid Cultural Space
by Zhiling Guo
Remediating kolam: Collaborative and intercultural explorations in dance and music
By Subhashini Goda & Anika Babel
By Marcia Mzindle
Dance with the Stars #1 — Dancing Across Borders in Time and Space – a critical reflection
By Sandra Chatterjee with Hannah Ma
Moving Through Borders, Breaking Through Bodies
By Kwanele Finch Thusi
“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
