JOMBA! dance, dance, dance

SA, international choreographers and dancers descend on Durban.

- Citizen reporter

PIZZAZZ: 13 DAYS OF WORLD CLASS CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCES.

The University of KwaZulu-Natal's Centre for Creative Arts will present the 26th JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience between 27 August and 8 September.

During these 13 days of world class contemporary dance, local and international choreographers will converge on Durban. The theme this year is Finding Our Way Home.

Curator Dr Lliane Loots said this "is against the backdrop of both local and global political renegotiations of what it means to be human, to belong, to have a home and to be a citizen of a country (and of a planet); against an occupied Gaza, a ravaged Ukraine, anti-foreigner rightwing political movements in Europe, a South African government of national unity that is busy maneuvering for power ... JOMBA! begins to ask what is means to find our way home".

Veteran South African dance maker Robyn Orlin is honoured as the 2024 JOMBA! Legacy Artist for her innovative, political, and deeply interrogated dance and theatre work spanning four decades.

Berlin-based, Orlin's We Wear Our Wheels with pride and slap your streets with color ... we said 'bonjour' to satan in 1820 - a work made with Moving Into Dance is a deeply personal work that emanates from one of her childhood memories visiting the Durban of the Zulu rickshaws.

Orlin delves into the rickshaw drivers' mischievous appropriation, sublimation, irony and self-deprecation as she celebrates the rickshaw drivers' refusal to concede their dignity to colonial and apartheid forces.