“Choreographies of Activism: Moving Bodies as Disruptive Presencing”

Each year, when we gather for JOMBA!, I find myself asking what it means to make a festival of dance at this particular moment in history. A festival is a space for celebration. It is a moment in which we acknowledge artistic excellence, creativity, discipline, virtuosity and the extraordinary capacity of the human body to communicate through movement.

But it is also, I think, an opportunity to pause and to ask more difficult questions about what it means to move, to gather and to insist upon the importance of art at a time when the world around us appears to be moving in increasingly dangerous and uncertain directions.

The Italian neo-Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci was writing from prison in 1930 when he reflected upon a historical moment that he understood as an interregnum—a moment between the death of one world and the uncertain birth of another. He wrote: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

Almost a century later, it is difficult not to recognise something of our own moment in these words. We live in a world marked by profound uncertainty and by escalating forms of violence, displacement and inequality. Across the world, we are daily witnessing wars, genocide, and erasure of people in spaces like Palestine, Sudan and the DRC, the destruction of homes and communities, the forced movement of people within our own – always brooding – South African xenophobia, the tightening of borders, the erosion of democratic freedoms and the devastating consequences of ecological crisis.

At the same time, here in South Africa, we continue to live with the unfinished histories of colonialism and apartheid, with deep structural inequality, pervasive gender-based violence, racism, patriarchy and ableism.

It is perhaps precisely within these conditions that we need to ask what dance has to do with the world.

To speak of dance only in terms of beauty and virtuosity is, I think, to miss something of its urgency. Dance is, at its most fundamental, a practice of presence. It asks the body to take space, to be seen and to be felt. Yet presence is never innocent in a society structured by inequality.

Who is allowed to be visible, and under what conditions?

Which bodies are celebrated, and which are policed, erased or rendered disposable?

Which forms of movement are recognised as art, and which are relegated to the margins?

These questions, whether we articulate them directly or not, haunt every moment of dance training, creation, performance, and curation – especially here in the Global South.

For women in particular, the act of occupying space through dance carries a specific charge. In a country still grappling with pervasive gender-based violence, freedom of movement is not guaranteed. Women’s bodies continue to be sites of control and violation. Against this backdrop, the act of dancing—of moving without apology, without containment and without shrinking oneself to accommodate the comfort of others—can become a form of resistance. It can become a refusal to be reduced to the status of victim and an insistence upon autonomy, agency and presence. We see this in the work of a choreographer like Mamela Nyamza.

To stand, to step and to gesture expansively in public spaces—and theatres are, of course, also public spaces—is to interrupt the narratives that position certain bodies as perpetually vulnerable, marginal or expendable. The dancing body can declare its presence – and the African dancing body can declare its own memory and history. We see this in the work of choreographers like Vincent Mantsoe.

But, this is not to romanticise dance as a solution to systemic violence. Dance does not replace policy, justice or structural change. But it does have the capacity to disrupt, to challenge and to reimagine what embodied freedom might look like. It can shift perception, and perception is never insignificant.

It is here that I find myself thinking about the idea of activism, and particularly about what it means to activate.

Activism asks us not simply to recognise the conditions of the world in which we live, but to enter into some form of relationship with them. To activate is to set something in motion, to disturb what has become settled, to challenge that which has become normalised and to insist that another way of seeing, being or relating might still be possible.

Dance, for me, has been and will always be, a place to activate, to act.

Choreography itself becomes a way of thinking about how bodies gather, how we support one another, how we resist, how we carry one another, how we fall and how we rise. This is the provocation that sits at the heart of JOMBA! 2026: Choreographies of Activism: Moving Bodies as Disruptive Presencing.

In a world in which some bodies are marginalised or rendered invisible, the act of being present can itself become politically charged. To occupy space—to stand on a stage, to move through a street, to gather in a public square or to insist upon one’s presence within a theatre—can interrupt the forces that would prefer that certain bodies remain silent or unseen.

Dancers with disabilities, for example, continue to be relegated to arenas of therapy, while their status as professional dance-makers is too often not considered—neither in questions of funding nor in the provision of access.

To speak of decolonising dance, then, cannot simply be to invoke another stylish catch–phrase. It is to undertake the difficult and ongoing work of dismantling bodily hierarchies. It asks us to reconsider whose knowledge counts, whose movement vocabularies are deemed worthy of recognition and support, and whose histories of exclusion continue to shape contemporary practice.

What would it mean to value dance not as an optional extra, or as decoration around what we understand to be the “real” work of society, but as an essential part of how human beings understand themselves, their histories and their relationships with one another?

There is something profoundly important in both individual and collective movement – which is why we feel the communal pain of anti-migration policies and marches, why we become angry and frustrated at border control, and painful visa processes, of political and personal processesthat decide who can move where, and how …

To dance together is to acknowledge interdependence. It is to recognise that bodies do not exist in isolation, but always in relation—to one another, to history, to memory and to place. Africa is a continent of movement and migrations.

And perhaps this is where hope enters the conversation.

The American theologian Walter Brueggemann reminds us that “hope arises from memory.”

Memory is not simply a way of looking backwards. To remember can also be an act of resistance. To remember is to refuse erasure. It is to acknowledge that our movements, our struggles and our imaginings do not begin with us.

We dance because others danced before us.

We create because others imagined before us.

We resist because others resisted before us.

And when I acknowledge the long and important history JOMBA! – 28 years tonight – of (particularly) South African dance-makers and storytellers such as Sylvia Glaser, Vincent Mantsoe, Gregory Maqoma, Mamela Nyamza, Sbonakaliso Ndaba, Andile Vellem, Nadine MacKenzie, Robyn Orlin, PJ Sabbagha, Jay Pather – and the list, of course, goes on – I am reminded that in dancing, our histories are not erased.

They are reworked.

They are contested.

They are carried forward.

And sometimes, perhaps, they are reimagined.

So, as we gather for JOMBA! 2026, perhaps our task is not simply to celebrate dance, although celebration remains important. Perhaps our task is also to deepen our understanding of what is at stake when bodies move.

What might happen if we allowed ourselves to be disrupted by the bodies we encounter over the days ahead?

We are, perhaps, still living in Gramsci’s interregnum.

The old world is dying.

The new world continues to struggle to be born.

And these are indeed dangerous times.

But they are also times in which artists continue to imagine.

Times in which people continue to gather.

Times in which bodies continue to move despite the forces that would contain them.

And perhaps this is where we might locate a different understanding of hope—not optimism, not the denial of the realities before us, but the difficult and necessary decision to continue imagining, creating, gathering and moving.

Hope arises from memory.

And, perhaps most importantly, to remain present to one another in a world that so often encourages us to turn away.

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And, in remaining present to one another, I want to take this moment to welcome you all tonight – to thank you for being a consistently beautiful (and present) audience for JOMBA!

I know that all here have read and access our full 2026 programme so I am not going wax poetically on (even though I would like to) but to say a very big welcome to all our featured dancers and dance makers, who have crossed many real and metaphysical borders to be with us – we love you for your presence and for fighting to keep your moving – and activated – stories alive with us.

We welcome home – because all life began in Africa – dance makers from: Ireland, Jamaica, Tanzania, Netherlands, Uganda, France, Spain, Brazil, Malawi, and of course from South Africa.

Particularly JOMBA! is delighted to be honouring South African choreographer and arts activist PJ Sabbagha as the 2026 JOMBA! Legacy Artist. The JOMBA! Legacy Artist is an annual honourificour festival gives to a significant dance maker in South Africa each year; someone who – due to the powerful longevity of their career – we feel deserves the spotlight. PJ Sabbagha, whose name has become synonymous with issue-based dance theatre, is the founding member and Managing and Artistic Director of The Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative (now in its 31st year), the Ebhudlweni Arts Center (in its 11th year), and the annual My Body My Space Rural Public Arts Festival (in its 11th year).

Deeply significant to the JOMBA! Legacy award is PJ’s lifelong commitment not only to choreographic excellence but also to a deep-seated care for community and his pioneering work that has shifted South African dance out of urban spaces. His curation and vision have shifted our dance landscape and JOMBA! is deeply humbled that we get to honour PJ in this way. Given our JOMBA! festival’s 2026 overall curatorial provocation of Choreographies of Activism: Moving Bodies as Disruptive Presencing, we can think of no other South African artist who has exemplified this movement across physical, economic and access-related borders in his dance work, whether through training and teaching, choreography or curation.

We open JOMBA! 2026 with his awarded work Noah. Accessing a collective memory around the myth of Noah, the performance uses a beguiling interplay of visual projection, shadow, and moving bodies to evoke a not-too-distant future, or possibly even the present. A present that is marked by irreversible climate change.

Within this frame the work is an immersion in the moment of crisis, the point of no return – what surfaces in the deluge are the notions of loss, love and letting go, of looking forwards and backwards at the same time. It is a work about memory!

…

Finally, I find myself returning to the words of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and in particular his poem In Jerusalem, translated by Fady Joudah.

At the end of Darwish’s poem, a woman soldier calls out:

“Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?”

And Darwish replies:

“You killed me … and I forgot, like you, to die.”

I am poetically reminded that bodies carry histories of refusal, and bodies carry the memories of violence and survival; despite being displaced, marginalised or rendered invisible; and there is the extraordinary, sometimes incomprehensible, persistence of our bodies capacity to remain present.

Perhaps this is what the dancing body can also teach us.

That the body remembers.

That it carries what history has attempted to erase.

That it continues to move.

That, even in the face of violence, loss and rupture, it insists upon its presence.

Welcome to the 28th JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience 2026.