JOMBA has launched a new show titled Jomba! Masihambisane Dialogues which will be hosted by the Centre for Creative Arts (UKZN), in partnership with the University of Warwick and the African Dance Disability Network. The show will take place online from May 24 to May 26.

The Jomba Dialogues aim to engage research, teaching practices and performance-making that look into integrated dance and disability dance as an embodied form, with a particular African focus, without being exclusive.

Hosted in the 25th anniversary year of the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience, Masihambisane Dialogues features a series of keynote addresses, panel discussions, Q&A sessions, workshops and online performance pieces which engage with the idea of what integrated dance is.

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“Perhaps we automatically think of disability when we encounter the term integrated dance,” says curator Lliane Loots. “But in this series of dialogues, we are asking whether we could, should and even have broadened our approaches to integrated dance in more intersectional ways. And what would this mean practically for disability dance itself as practice, in teaching and in performance-making?”

Loots says that Masihambisane Dialogues features dancers and choreographers from all over the world, working in integrated practices, who will share their own practices; dance educators working with integrated training methodologies; researchers who are engaging the intersections between dance, disability, postcoloniality, decoloniality and new methodologies, and disabled and non-disabled dancers who can share how they have developed their own (amongst other key areas) practices, techniques, methods of training and choreographic practices.

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“Exciting news is that Petra Kuppers (University of Michigan, USA) will facilitate a workshop based on Starship Somatics, a community dance modality she developed during the early days of the Covid pandemic which looked for a way to create online environments for accessible, disability-culture-focused somatic creative movement. This workshop uses improvised movement (inner and outer movement, as is accessible and appropriate to the participant), dream journeys, sounding, writing and drawing as transportation devices: firmly grounded in the sensory immediacy of our beds, sofas, floors and windows, and flying wide to honour ways of being of all kinds. All are welcome who are grounded in disability-culture values – booking is essential for this!” said Loots.

For more info or for the full programme, go to: https://jomba.ukzn.ac.za/masihambisane-dialogues/

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