(Vincent Mantsoe. Pic by Val Adamson)
The Stage Answered
Back: What Vincent Mantsoe's Desert
Poems Made Me Question
By Siphokazi Sisanda Gumenke (JOMBA! Khuluma 2026)
Edited by Clare
Craighead (for JOMBA! Khuluma)
The blackout? The
lighting? The desert landscape? Why does Mantsoe keep nodding, folding, going
down? These were some of the questions I carried through Vincent Mantsoe's Desert Poems. I left the performance
with more questions than I entered with - but they were better questions.
That matters.
At the Elizabeth
Sneddon Theatre on August 29, Mantsoe does not enter the stage as though it is
simply there for him to occupy. He seems to listen to it first. I hear
crickets, then sounds that remind me of crackling fire. His body responds as
though heat is travelling through it - fuelling him, exhausting him, pulling
him deeper into the landscape.
The desert is not
only behind him. It begins to happen through him.
I went into the
performance thinking I understood something about spirituality. Then he began
ukuxhensa.
Growing up in a
spiritually-rooted family, I did not only watch that moment. I recognised
something in it. Before I had decided what the movement meant, I found myself
ululating. My body responded before my mind had organised an interpretation.
That response became
important to the way I watched the rest of the solo.
Mantsoe's movement
can look simple until you pay attention to its detail: kneeling; tight pulls
through the torso; jumps that seem to suspend him for a moment; precise strides
that cut across the stage as though marking territory. At one point he
surrenders towards the floor; at another, his feet seem reluctant to settle
fully before the body rises again with an unexpected softness.
I also recognised
something close to ukucupha - preparing for ukusina. That recognition made the
movement linger for me. It was familiar, but not fully familiar. Mantsoe could
isolate one part of his body and somehow make the entire stage feel occupied. I
kept wondering how one body could seem to be everywhere without actually being
everywhere.
That was one of the
moments when the stage started answering back.
The JOMBA! TALKS
DANCE conversation with Lliane Loots after the performance did not give me a
neat explanation. Instead, it challenged some of the explanations I had already
made for myself. Mantsoe spoke about Koba through observation and recalled
learning from watching his grandmother and elders, including the everyday
action of sweeping. I had read some of his movement as grounding. Hearing about
observation, bending and ordinary bodies did not make my first reading wrong;
it made it less complete.
The blackout tested
me in the same way.
When the stage
suddenly went dark and some audience members began clapping, I imagined Mantsoe
returning from another universe or portal. It made sense to me in the moment.
Then the conversation complicated that certainty.
Some assumptions are
dangerous when we turn them into facts.
The darkness could
hold something else: vulnerability, interruption, the possibility that
suffering does not end just because we think a sequence has finished. I
realised that my task as a critic was not to force every image into the first
meaning that came to me. I had to keep looking.
That is also why the
desert began to shift. Mantsoe spoke about an earlier experience dancing in the
Namib Desert for British television, a memory that sits behind this solo.
Suddenly, the landscape did not feel like scenery. It became heat, solitude,
memory, endurance and spirit - something external, but also something the body
could carry inside itself.
By the final bow, I
was watching differently. Mantsoe brings his hands above his head, lowers
himself and reconnects with the floor. Earlier, I might have rushed to name
exactly what that gesture meant. Now I was more interested in what it asked me
to notice.
Desert Poems challenged what I thought I knew about
spirituality because it would not allow me to stay comfortable inside
recognition. Sometimes I saw something that felt familiar. Sometimes the
post-show conversation shifted that reading. Sometimes the movement remained
unresolved.
And perhaps that is
the point.
The stage answered
back, but it did not hand me one correct meaning. It made me question what I
knew, what I assumed, and what my own body recognised before I could explain
it.
I came looking for
answers.
Desert Poems taught me to pay closer attention to the
questions. - Siphokazi Sisanda Gumenke
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