What Moves When Bodies Gather? JOMBA! 2026 and the Choreographies of Activism — a festival preview
By Clare Craighead (for JOMBA! KHULUMA)
JOMBA! Contemporary
Dance Experience
Activism is a word with weight. It is also a word we use easily. We recognise its gestures, its slogans, its urgency. But what happens when we place activism alongside dance? What might a body do that a placard cannot? And when does moving, gathering, remembering, teaching, making or simply taking up space become political?
These questions sit inside the 28th JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience and its 2026 curatorial provocation, “Choreographies of Activism: Moving Bodies as Disruptive Presencing”.
They are not entirely new questions for this festival.
Across 28 years, JOMBA! has repeatedly made space for contemporary dance that unsettles easy borders: between art and politics, the personal and the public, African and international practice, and the body as something we watch and the body as something lived, social and historical. So perhaps this year’s theme does not announce an entirely new direction. Rather, it brings into sharper focus something that has long moved through the festival.
Across its history, JOMBA! has offered space to artists whose work carries difficult and often unresolved questions: race and colonialism, gender and sexuality, displacement, disability, belonging, memory, environmental crisis and the politics of who gets to appear. But activism cannot only be located in what a dance is about. It may also sit in the longer work of making and holding space — for African contemporary dance, for exchange across borders and generations, for emerging artists, for critical conversation, and for bodies and practices that have not always been afforded equal visibility.
This makes the word activism usefully open.
In 2026, PJ Sabbagha, Mamela Nyamza and Vincent Mantsoe bring very different artistic histories and choreographic languages into the same festival. Their work need not stand for one idea of political dance. Nor do the international artists gathering in Durban need to be folded neatly into a shared language of resistance. Part of what a festival makes possible is this encounter between difference: different histories, different urgencies, different relationships to the body, and different ideas about what dance might be asked to do.
Activism may arrive loudly, through confrontation or refusal. But it might also sit in persistence, memory, ritual, humour, care, survival and community; in who gets to dance, who gets to make, and who gets to be seen. Sometimes it may be found in the sustained act of continuing to make work at all.
The spaces around the main performances stretch these questions further. OPEN HORIZONS creates space for developing and established choreographers; FEMME FORWARD invests in emerging women-identifying dance artists in KwaZulu-Natal; DIGITAL JOMBA! asks how choreography shifts when bodies meet cameras and screens; while workshops, talks and public conversations allow ideas to keep moving after the dancing has stopped.
And KHULUMA asks us
to write.
The 2026 JOMBA! KHULUMA Dance Writing Residency is already underway, with a new group of 13 emerging writers beginning the work of researching, looking, listening, questioning and finding language for what they are about to encounter. As JOMBA! unfolds, their reviews and reflections will begin to appear too — as part of the conversation that gathers around them.
Perhaps this is where “Choreographies of Activism” becomes most interesting: not as a definition that the programme must prove, but as an invitation to remain attentive.
What kinds of presence become disruptive, and in what circumstances? What histories arrive with the bodies we watch? What does it mean to make space, to hold it, or to shift the terms on which that space has been offered? Where might activism be found in the visible gesture, and where might it be quieter, slower, less immediately legible?
The 28th JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience runs in Durban from August 25 to September 6, 2026. Watch this space as the 2026 KHULUMA writers begin sharing their responses throughout the festival — and come and encounter the dancing for yourself.
Book your tickets through Webtickets.