To complement a substantial performance programme in this year’s online JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience, a number of conversations, industry panels and a daily blog with reviews will be available to audiences during the festival from 24 August to 5 September.
Presented by UKZN’s Centre for Creative Arts, the festival offers JOMBA! Talks Dance: Conversations That Cross Borders which features 4 live conversations with some of the festival’s participants and guests. Artistic director of JOMBA!, Lliane Loots will engage in a range of open forum discussions that include the political and cultural on-going sustainability of dance, of what it means to dance in the digital age, how we find our humanity inside technology, and what it means to cross borders as dance makers. Featured here in conversation are JOMBA! 2021 Legacy Artist Jay Pather and Ketu Katrak (and the digital launch of Katrak’s book : Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa, Alfred Hinkel from the Garage Dance Ensemble (with a sneak peak of his new documentary Die Dans Van My Heenkoms (The Dance of My Origin) – a South African Dance Legacy- Bolero stories told by Alfred Hinkel), Hannah Ma (Germany), and Vikram Iyengar and Kunal Chakraborty from Calcutta (India) speaking about the work of the Pickle Factory Dance Foundation.
JOMBA! Forging Alliances is an industry support programme run by JOMBA!’s Thobile Maphanga, which aims to provide dance makers with industry specific information that assists in building fortified relationships and partnerships across creative technical spaces that border digital and live dance. This live 3-panel platform will engage industry professionals on increasing market reach and marketability, behind the screen technical preparation and legally sound collaborations. This series is aimed to support artists and dancers working professionally and who need insights into the back end of how to manage their ‘brand’ and their professional engagements.
Sasha Fourie (dancer/choreographer) and Publicist Sharlene Versfeld feature in Build Digital Community, Thabo Pule (Stage & Production Manager) and Wesley Maherry (Lighting Designer & Production Manager) in Connect Lines of Production, and Roland Nzanzu (Capasso) and Sifiso Khumalo (Dancer/Choreographer) Bridge the Musical Gap.
Finally the ever-popular JOMBA! Khuluma Blog and Digital Publication facilitated by Clare Craighead, will involve the on-going support (via a two week residency) of dance writing and dance criticism through a series of closed webinars/seminars for graduate and undergraduate dance students. This leads to the daily JOMBA! blog which can be accessed from this link: https://jombafestival.medium.com/, and to the final JOMBA! KHULUMA Digital Publication released after the festival each year.
Student participants this year come from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, WITS University, North West University, Durban University of Technology, University of East London (UK), “The Co|laboratory” (United Arab Emirates) and See Chicago Dance (USA).
For facilitation, Craighead is joined this year, by Tammy Ballantyne (The AR(t)chive, WITS, Johannesburg), Dr. Sarahleigh Castelyn School of Arts and Creative Industries, University of East London (UK), Lauren Warnecke from See Chicago Dance, Chicago (USA) Associate Professor Gregory King (Kent State University, USA), Artistic Director of UAE “The Co|laboratory”, Lauren Noble.
JOMBA! is free to view online. For the full programme go to : https://bit.ly/JOMBAProg
To subscribe to the YOUTUBE CHANNEL to watch JOMBA! go to: https://bit.ly/WatchJomba
