(Above: Hannah Ma/Flatfoot
Dance Company's "AMA"... courtesy of Val Adamson)
Bodies In Transit-Between Myth And Memory by Thembani Ngxelo,
for JOMBA! Khuluma
Edited by Marcia
Mzindle and Clare Craighead
The late
African-American wordsmith Maya Angelou once remarked that while we delight in
the beauty of the butterfly, we rarely acknowledge the changes it endured to
achieve that beauty. Transformation—often unseen, often painful—was the
connective tissue between two works presented at last night’s JOMBA!
Contemporary Dance Experience: AMA – Once
I was, then I wasn’t, choreographed by German artist of Chinese-Alpine
descent Hannah Ma in collaboration with Durban’s FLATFOOT Dance Company, and KANYAR epilogue, choreographed and
performed by Réunion Island’s Didier Boutiana with Soul City. Both pieces
traversed ritual, myth, and memory, producing bodies as sites of becoming,
unbecoming, and ancestral inscription.
AMA reimagines Ma’s earlier solo DIEU/MONSTRE into an ensemble ritual performed by FLATFOOT’s six dancers—Sifiso Khumalo, Jabu Siphika, Zinhle Nzama, Ndumiso Dube, Siseko Duba, and Sbonga Ndlovu. Rooted in ritual and myth, the work interrogates the archetype of the Mother as life-giver, protector, boundary, and unknowable Other.
The opening image is arresting: Khumalo lying beneath a suspended raffia cloak, bells tied to his waist clacking with each gesture. The bells are both burden and resistance, their sound marking the weight of inherited histories. When he breaks free and cries out “Mama!” before being enveloped by the cloak, the moment reads as invocation, rupture, and rebirth all at once.
Ma’s choreography merges her own lineage—traditional Chinese and Alpine folk dances—with the embodied vocabularies of the FLATFOOT dancers, whose experiences as Black South African artists anchor the work in lived histories of resilience. Ele Bleffert’s costumes, threaded with straw, shimmer under Wesley Maherry’s lighting, while Ma’s soundscape blends indigenous resonances with the music of Nu Parks, Talking Rocks, and Damla Temel, producing an atmosphere at once ancient and futuristic.
One of the work’s most potent interventions comes when Siseko Duba enters wearing a bull mask. The image unsettles: a body caught between animal and human, myth and memory. Across cultures, the bull carries connotations of virility, sacrifice, and confrontation with the sacred. Within AMA, the mask troubles the maternal archetype by revealing its shadow side - strength intertwined with violence, nurture with dominance, tenderness with fear.
Duba’s masked performance exposes motherhood not as a single, sentimental image but as a boundary force, demanding negotiation and sometimes confrontation. It is here that Ma’s work most powerfully challenges binaries, suggesting that creation and destruction, love and resistance, are bound together in cycles of transformation.
Where AMA works through ritual multiplicity, Didier Boutiana’s KANYAR epilogue pares the stage down to stark symbols. Boutiana, a hip-hop-rooted dancer/choreographer from Réunion Island, begins grounded and still at centre stage, while a megaphone hangs suspended to his right—an ominous presence suggesting both amplification and silence. Then comes a deceptively simple gesture: he pulls coins from his pockets and scatters them across the floor. This act reverberates with layered meanings. As offering, it recalls ritual sacrifice, placing fragments of worth before an unseen altar. As protest, it is refusal—rejecting the reduction of identity to economic value. And as a gesture of loss, it becomes a haunting metaphor for lives deemed expendable within global systems of exclusion and extraction. The coins glitter under the light, spark(l)ing contradiction: both precious and futile, both material and emptied of meaning.
He then moves across the stage with deliberate intention, gathering the audience’s attention through motion alone. As side lights strike his body, they sculpt a striking silhouette that follows him to centre stage, where he stands with his back to the audience - a gesture that feels both intimate and defiant. His choreography reveals a seamless fusion of hip-hop and contemporary dance, rooted in his own expressive lineage and sharpened through the dramaturgy he first developed in KANYAR. Where the original solo mapped the psychological dimensions of conditioning and exclusion, KANYAR epilogue distils that inquiry into sharper fragments, a “silent existential shout in the night,” as if memory itself has been stripped down to its rawest cry.
Set against the ambient sound of ocean waves, the performance evokes a sense of border-crossing—transporting us to the shores of Réunion Island, both physically and emotionally. The megaphone hanging stage right becomes a conduit for poetic expression, perhaps even prayer. Though the words that escape it are difficult to decipher, the emotional clarity in Boutiana’s delivery is unmistakable. His movements and vocalisations suggest a deep yearning to be heard, a pride in identity, and an obsessive grappling with something unresolved.
In this way, Boutiana transcends the role of dancer. He becomes a fonkézèr—a poet in motion, channelling the soul of his island through every gesture and breath. The coins on the ground, the silhouette in the light, the megaphone’s fractured speech: these images assemble into a meditation on value, silence, and survival. They remind us that exclusion is not an abstraction but a lived, embodied reality—one that Boutiana dances with a ferocity both tender and unrelenting.
What unites AMA and KANYAR epilogue is their use of objects that extend the body into symbolic terrain: Duba’s bull mask, a force of animal, ancestral, and maternal collision; Boutiana’s scattered coins, a ritual of offering, protest, and loss. Both gestures destabilise meaning, forcing audiences to reckon with the contradictions at the heart of transformation.
Together, the two works framed the stage as a threshold—between myth and memory, ritual and resistance, silence and sound. They reminded us, as Angelou cautioned, that beauty is inseparable from process, from the unseen struggle of change. What we witnessed were not butterflies to be admired, but the metamorphoses themselves: bodies in transit, inscribed by history, carrying forward the possibility of becoming.
Both works had one final performance on September 5, as part of the 2025 JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience. - Thembani Ngxelo
JOMBA! Khuluma
The JOMBA! Khuluma
is a Dance Writing Residency that runs as part of the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance
Experience. The residency has taken on
many shapes and forms since its inaugural edition under the mentorship of
Adrienne Sichel in 2010, including international and local participation and
inter-university engagement including institutions such as UKZN, DUT and Wits
University as well as The University of East London in the UK. The aim of the Khuluma is to nurture the next
generation of dance writers in South Africa.
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