(Above: Live Open Horizons_ pic by Val Adamson)
Embodied Borders and
Ecological Grief: Dance as Resistance in JOMBA! Digital
Open Horizons 2025 by Amahle Radebe, JOMBA! Khuluma Dance Writing Residency
Participant for 2025
Edited by Marcia Mzindle and Clare Craighead for JOMBA! Khuluma
The 2025 JOMBA! Digital Open Horizons platform once again affirmed the festival’s commitment to nurturing diverse, experimental voices in contemporary dance.
This year’s winner, Simunye by Brenda “BreeH” Cele, stood out as a powerful docu-dance film blending movement and storytelling to confront climate change through a South African lens. The film meditates on the interconnectedness of humans and nature, focusing particularly on the ocean as both a fragile ecosystem and a spiritual site of unity.
Exploring the festival’s broader theme, Moving Border/Lands, the platform also featured five other compelling works: Of Impermanent Things by Jacques Batista and Werner Marx (South Africa), Know Body by Alan Parker (South Africa), Brief Visits to Shadows by Sasha Fourie (South Africa), The Space Between Us by Maulid Owino (Kenya), and Radix by Mario Gaglione (Italy/South Africa).
Opening the programme, Of Impermanent Things placed Werner Marx in shifting landscapes — first a desert-like site, then green mountains beside a stone figure. His small, precise gestures suggested the act of marking or claiming space, the body both fragile and enduring in relation to its environment.
Alan Parker’s Know Body interrogated embodiment and self-awareness through the words of Baruch Spinoza: “We do not know what a body can do.” Performed by four dancers in a library, the choreography moved from walking and crawling to physical confrontation. Struggle and resistance were written into clenched fists and collisions, while a later sequence — set to Boubacar Traoré’s Kar Kar Madison — transformed the space into one of play and challenge, as dancers disrupted shelves and “moved the borders” of bodily possibility.
Sasha Fourie’s Brief Visits to Shadows offered an intimate solo of memory and trauma. Beginning with the act of lighting and extinguishing a flame, the dancer moved between gestures of fragility and collapse, her body pressed against walls and curled on the floor in sorrow — a stark embodiment of loss.
Maulid Owino’s The Space Between Us explored intimacy and rupture in a romantic relationship. A duet unfolded through graceful Ballet phrases, but distance soon intervened: as the dancers separated, Owino was left alone, clutching his chest before sinking to the floor. The choreography captured how love can dissolve into absence.
Mario Gaglione’s Radix (Latin for “root”) raised questions of origin and belonging. Beginning in darkness with cyan light playing across his body, the solo evolved into a Balletic exploration in the studio. His leaps across floor markings suggested both boundaries and their transgression — a meditation on borders both visible and imagined.
Closing the programme, Cele’s Simunye resonated as a deeply urgent call for ecological consciousness. Through ritual, imagery, and metaphor, the work framed the ocean as sacred, a site where prayer, healing, and survival converge. Coins and the ibhayi lezangoma (traditional healer’s cloth) evoked ancestral practices, while dancers with plastic over their faces embodied suffocation — a stark image of how pollution strangles ocean life. Footage of dead fish and whales, and a reference to Durban’s 2017 tsunami, intensified the film’s warning: “The Ocean is Angry.”
Cele reminds us: “You and I are the same.” In her vision, protecting the sea means protecting ourselves — for biodiversity, spirituality, and survival are intertwined. With exceptional clarity, Simunye insists that we are the lifeguards of the ocean, responsible for resisting destruction and safeguarding the future.
The JOMBA! DIGITAL OPEN HORIZONS remains available on the JOMBA! YouTube channel for the remainder of the festival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ6ZAf22OPI
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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