(Pic by Val Adamson)
Who Gets to Frame
Paradise? PEPONI Turns the Audience
Into the Argument
By Nomaleti Khumalo (for JOMBA! KHULUMA 2026)
Edited by Clare
Craighead
The most
uncomfortable moment in PEPONI was
also one of the most enjoyable.
Five audience
members were invited onto the runway. We cheered. We voted. Somebody won.
Then a performer
refused the result.
She stripped off the
clothes, threw them across the stage and turned the fun back on us. In that
instant, I realised that House of Wondar
had not simply invited the audience to participate in paradise. It had given us
power inside it - and then made us look at what we did with that power.
That is why I keep
returning to one question after PEPONI:
who gets to frame paradise?
The Tanzanian-based House of Wondar's debut stage
production, directed and choreographed by Matthieu Nieto with dramaturgy by
Koleka Putuma, asks whether paradise can be created here and now on the African
continent. It does not answer by presenting a beautiful image. Instead, it
keeps showing us how images are made.
A large wooden frame
is carried through the performance. Sometimes it behaves like a window.
Sometimes it becomes a television. Sometimes the performers stand inside it as
if we are being asked to look at a picture. At one point, an imagined safari
world is described rather than shown. We have to complete the picture
ourselves.
For me, that is
where the politics begins.
Africa has been
framed for centuries by images produced for somebody else's gaze: wilderness,
poverty, exoticism, danger, paradise. PEPONI's
frame made me aware that a picture is never innocent. Somebody chooses its
borders.
The performance then
gives that logic a remote control.
Multiple performers
speak at once, each presenting an object or idea as though it might hold the
'key' to life. A remote can mute and unmute them. The comedy of the device is
sharp because the politics is familiar. Attention is power. To control the
volume is to decide who gets heard.
What I found more
interesting than the obvious metaphor was what the dancers did together. They
could share the same music without moving identically. Different rhythms and
phrases occupied the stage at once. Unity did not require sameness.
That offered a
different model of paradise to the runway competition.
The runway asks us
to rank. The ensemble asks us to coexist.
And then the runway
traps us.
We enjoy choosing a
winner. We experience the pleasure of judging. Only when the performer rejects
the result do we realise that our participation has reproduced the very
structure the work may be questioning. If the vote was choreographed, what else
was? The cheering? The categories? Our confidence that choosing somebody meant
empowering them?
This is where the
audience becomes part of the argument rather than decoration around it.
After the protest,
one performer remains in slower movement while the stage around her is still
unsettled. That image mattered to me because refusal cannot be the whole of
liberation. Throwing away what has been imposed creates an opening, but then
something has to be built.
PEPONI does not give that reconstruction to us as a finished programme. It
returns us to the body.
What can this body
choose?
What can these
bodies build together without needing to become identical?
Who is holding the
frame?
Who is holding the
remote?
And, perhaps most
importantly, when an audience is given the power to choose, can it recognise the
systems hidden inside its own choices?
PEPONI calls itself paradise.
Its sharper
provocation is that paradise may begin when we stop consuming somebody else's
picture and become accountable for what we place inside the frame. - Nomaleti
Khumalo
ABOUT KHULUMA
JOMBA! KHULUMA is
the festival’s young writers’ platform, run in collaboration with the University
of KwaZulu-Natal’s Drama and Production Studies programme. The writers are
registered Honours students who engage closely with the JOMBA! Contemporary
Dance Experience through reviews, features, interviews and critical reflection.
The platform is co-facilitated by Clare Craighead and Marcia Mzindle, who work
with the writers through an ongoing editorial process that supports the
development of distinctive critical voices while sharpening their attention to
performance, politics, spectatorship and the conditions in which dance is made.
In this way, KHULUMA functions both as a space for emerging arts journalism and
as a record of how a new generation of writers is encountering, questioning and
interpreting contemporary dance in South Africa.
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