(Scene from “One Step at a Time”)
Freedom, Isolation and Displacement embodied in JOMBA!’s “AFRICAN DIGITAL VOICES”. Review by Nkosingiphile (Mancane) Dlamini.
Three incredible screen dance films from the African continent feature as part of JOMBA!’s “AFRICAN DIGITAL VOICES” Le Sol Oblige (The Earth Obliges) by Didier Boutiana and his Soul City dancers from Reunion Island; CUT (part1) featuring 2022 JOMBA! Legacy Artist, Vincent Mantsoe and One Step at a Time by Pak Ndjamena and Ivan Barros from Mozambique sit alongside each other on this stirring and critical African digital platform.
A tar curved road appears on screen with seven figures walking, suddenly they disappear. So begins Le Sol Oblige, I’m drawn in. The music is intense, anticipation builds. A vast landscape, many intersecting roads, a mountain and vast open space – after over two years of lockdown, the freedom of movement and capacity to dance outside are a tonic.
The dancers, like panthers, climb the mountain, the frame shifts, they’re now on dry sand, kicking up dust. Leaning on each other, their movements include lifts, jumps and back falls. Their movements make statements. Freedom … community … the power of dance.
A drone shot reveals their footprints in the sand, their shadows dancing in the dust. The camera zooms in close, a group of seven dancers oscillate between fluid contact and stillness. I love the fact that their movements are not rushed. I feel breath, freedom and the simple pleasure of being outside without any regulations.
In contrast, Vincent Mantsoe’s CUT (part 1), which was made at the onset of global lockdowns in early 2020, is claustrophobic and apprehensive. The score is composed by Mpho Molikeng, and it works to highlight the mood of the work. Filmed in black and white in a dance studio, Mantsoe dances his Goba technique inside cut frames. African music instruments Umakhoyane hang on the wall in frame, perhaps a reference to home and Mantsoe’s ancestral beliefs. His precision of movement between elongated stretches and lunges yearns for escape to community. A strobe effect brings him in and out of focus, the frames open and close, and all the while Mantsoe remains, alone, relying on his dance to keep him sane.
“Five of the countries hosting the largest number of refugees are in Sub-Saharan Africa.” This statement fades onto screen near the beginning of Pak Ndjamena and Ivan Barros’s cinematic One Step at a Time ... There’s a deliberate interchange between body and music which is offered by May Mbira.
Through movement, the body is forced to experience feelings of loss. The need to belong to a group or geographic space. Ndjamena moves his head, there’s a swinging light that highlights and casts shadow on his upper body, I feel pain and sadness. His movements, echoing krumping, simultaneously painful and aggressive. A cross cut reveals a displaced Ndjamena’s body on a deserted ground, there’s no-one. In shot are an old house and shacks. He wants to belong; he wants to see people to perhaps share his pain with. He sees a group of people, they interact, but he ends up alone again. There’s a sense that earth might swallow him as he tries to fit into a suitcase.
The film ends with a close up of Ndjamena’s face, dirty saliva seeps out of his mouth – a grotesque image and one that speaks painfully to the displacement that the work deals with.
AFRICAN DIGITAL VOICES is available online via the JOMBA! YouTube Channel until the end of the festival on September 11, 2022: Visit https://youtu.be/B6DSOd7Q90M - Nkosingiphile (Mancane) Dlamini.
JOMBA! is one of the festivals presented
by the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. For more
information visit their website by clicking on the centre’s logo to the right
of this article.
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