Jomba! Opening Night Speech by Lliane Loots
I Greet you all tonight in a spirit of love and a spirit of triumph. This is the city of Durban, my home. Durban transects both my inner and outer geography. It is a Southern African city that holds an honesty that circles its identity as a port city — it is a meeting place that connects memory and history; Shaka, Ghandi, John Dube, Albert Luthuli.
It continues to be a port city — a meeting place — of our imagination and for JOMBA! is has once again, brought some of our continents, and some of the world’s finest artists together to culturally find what we have in common and maybe, graciously remind ourselves about the good part of what is different — all through the graceful slide of the body against the floor.
I am reminded that English is my second language as I step into the dance studio and begin to move in my mother tongue — the body!
This year we hear the dance mother tongue of the Congolese, of Nigeria, of the Dutch, the Chicago voice of the USA, and we hear our own South African voices as we celebrate the critical art form of dance and its ability to move us. Of history that is always written — sometimes with violence and sometimes with love — on the body.
This is a country consumed by memories of what has gone before. It is a country in which we walk with our history day by day and moment by moment. It is a history that often seems overwhelming in the enormity of its terror and suffering, but it is also ours — it is our deep privilege to learn from as children of the South.
We face now too and even bigger terror, and that is the terror of forgetting; the contemporary loss of memory.
While we get seduced by yet another dance reality competition show on television that promises the winner fame and fortune, while we begin to feel like we are owed the lives of the rich and famous simply because freedom has been sold to us — in our new democracy — as an experience in a shopping mall, while we find ourselves being uninterested by the demands of contemporary art and dance because it asks us to think and feel and listen, we begin to slowly participate in the death of critical arts; and with this, the death of our resistance.
Our artists are being forced to inhabit the red light district as we sell our bodies — and with this our art — to entertain and seduce an elite who only fund us if we are seen to be working towards their ideals, their visions. We are being turned into street walkers hoping to be seen.
In South Africa, the current national government has placed arts and culture into two categories of value; for funding we must be seen to participate in the agenda of nation building, and we must be seen to be part of social cohesion.
While neither “nation building” nor “social cohesion” are purposefully defined, bureaucrats who hold the purse, seem to feel that this implies art that does not challenge, art that does not speak back, art that pretends that the dreams of our liberation struggle’s democracy have already been realised. In fact they are not interested in art at all; they want entertainment. Something palatable while they east sushi off naked women or toast their victory before a crowd of hungry workers.
So, while, to me, a term like “social cohesion” feels vaguely like social control, I want to stand here tonight WITH ALL OF YOU to claim back the theatre and performance spaces of our city and remind the political elites and the social rule makers, the bureaucrats with the fat purses, that art — when it is most critical, when it is most subversive and most difficult to engage, when it shouts and scream, and when it quite simply talks back — this is national building!
True democracy does not silence its artists by forcing a political agenda onto what is deems ‘acceptable’ art making. Instead it nurtures the voices of its storytellers — it dancers and poets, filmmakers and choreographers — and understand that it is the artists who will remind us of the community we still need to build, of the stories that still need to be told, of what still needs true healing in our society.
To silence a nation’s artists or to force a cultural and political agenda onto our art making, to reduce us to beggars and prostitutes hoping to catch a break, is to destroy the foundation of democracy — and of a nation.
I come back to Nigeria writer and poet Ben Okri who reminds a post-independence and post-colonial Africa that (and I know he will forgive me for slightly paraphrasing his words);
An economic and political re-birth in Africa, without a re-birth of heart, culture and spirit will be a shallow one; and it will pass with the first chill wind of reality. Already we see an Africa that counts its re-birth by the number of skyscrapers, men in suits and ties, economic values that lie in global stock exchanges. If our African re-birth is measured by a galvanising towards Western ideals that allows a tinge of African cloth and a tribal dance at an event opening to give it authenticity, we are selling ourselves to a history that is already so deeply rigged against our continent.
For me, 17 years on in the fight to keep JOMBA! alive, a fight that has been a commitment to a dedicated contemporary and critical art space for dance and choreography in Durban, I truly — with love and gratitude — welcome all of you tonight because it is you, the audience, the dancers, my own university and my own College of Humanities, who have walked every step of the way with me and the Centre for Creative Arts.
Sometimes the biggest act of support for this re-birth of Africa’s critical arts is to simply buy a ticket to the show. And if you did not buy a ticket tonight, there are another 11 nights for you to do so!
I stand here on behalf of a whole team of amazing individuals from the Centre for Creative Arts and we collectively welcome tonight’s artists that honour our on-going commitment to support connections on our African content. We are humbled by the danced stories that they bring us. Tonight you will see some of the very best and most profound African dance makers in the form of Nigeria’s Adedayo Liadi and Qudus Onikeku and the DRC’s Faustin Linyekula.
I welcome our long time Dutch partners, INTRODANS who come having funded their own way to Durban because they simply wanted to come again and participate in the spirit of our city and our festival. This too is community.
I welcome my Chicago based family, DEEPLY ROOTED DANCE THEATRE, who have been with us already for two weeks working and plotting with us to change the world one dance class at a time … I am humbled by your love, your community, and sheer gift of your presence. Kevin Iega Jeff, Nicole Clark Springer and Elana Anderson — who knew I would find family in America?
This also includes American Christian Epps a lighting designer who takes time off from making films like Selma and working with Spike Lee, to spend 2 weeks at JOMBA! sharing his technical skills, hanging lights and drinking lots of tea with us.
We welcome, with love, the local South African artists, who, despite so much, continue to speak, dance and make art. Choreographers and dancers who know inside and out what it means to fight forgetting.
I deeply honour our major funding partner in the form of the eThekwini Metro Parks, Recreation and Culture. I welcome Eric Apelgren and his team from the Metro IGR office. I welcome eThewini’s Guy Redman who has also been a huge support to the longevity of JOMBA! I am thankful, all over again, to be a Durbanite as our local government has understood the value of supporting out critical contemporary dance!
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