(Above: #1 FRAGMENTS Desire Davids & Benoit
Bottex ©Fabian Aubry)
Fragments and Struggles: Dance as Reflection and Resistance
By Amahle Radebe, JOMBA! Khuluma Dance Writing Residency
2025
Edited by Clare
Craighead
On the first day of
spring, 1 September 2025, the courtyard of the KZNSA Gallery became a site of
reflection and resonance. Against the backdrop of Bulwer Road, with its
restless traffic humming just beyond the gallery boundary, the reflective stage
surface caught light and movement, doubling dancer and sky. It was here that
two powerful choreographic works unfolded: Desire Davids’ QUI EST-CE? #1 Fragments and Bouziane Bouteldja’s Of Dances and Struggles. Together, they
created an evening that blurred the lines between personal narrative, political
commentary, and shared embodiment.
Davids, choreographer and dancer, opened the night with QUI EST-CE? #1 Fragments, accompanied live by the soundscapes of Benoit Bottex. Sliding onto the reflective stage, her arms moved in elongated gestures that pulled against the night air, as if weaving threads between herself and the world around her. The traffic from Bulwer Road seemed to seep into the performance, merging with Bottex’s score of water and air, making the urban backdrop part of the work’s rhythm.
Approaching the audience, Davids revealed the images embedded in her skirt: portraits and fragments of Black lives, stitched by Pascale Beroujon. Lifted under the stage lights, the skirt became both garment and archive, probing identity, intersectionality, and the fragility of visibility. Her gestures—part reaching, part grasping—seemed to echo the movement of cars beyond the fence, signalling the simultaneity of personal history and the present-day pulse of the city. Each lift of fabric posed the question: Who is this? And in turn, the audience was invited to ask: Who are we?
If Davids’ work invited intimate self-reflection, Bouteldja’s Of Dances and Struggles widened the frame to a global collective. Joined by Fakri Allaoui and guest dancers from Wentworth’s Dance Movement, he began inverted—balanced on his head—while sketching an upside-down map of the world – placing Africa at the “top”. Behind him, the sound of cars swelled faintly from Bulwer Road, grounding his provocation: to re-orient how we see, hear, and dance histories.
From flamenco’s Arab-Berber and Indian roots, to South African pantsula, to voguing, hip-hop, and krump, Bouteldja traced dance histories that are alive with resistance and survival. The reflective stage caught every footfall, mirroring the dancers as if to multiply their presence, while the city’s traffic noise pressed up against the performance like an unruly counter-rhythm. His refrain -“Not only the oppressed need to be liberated, but the oppressors too”—spoke not only to history, but to the pressing urgency of the here and now.
The performance broke its own borders: audience members were drawn onto the reflective surface, invited to move alongside the dancers, collapsing the boundary between art and life. In those moments, the stage seemed porous, catching the breath of the Durban night.
Together, QUI EST-CE? #1 Fragments and Of Dances and Struggles offered a Spring Day performance programme that was at once intimate and expansive. Set against the backdrop of Bulwer Road’s hum and the stage’s mirrored surface, the works asked us to reckon with personal and collective histories, and to imagine dance as both question and answer in the ongoing struggle for liberation. - Amahle Radebe
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