Dr. Lliane Loots opens JOMBA! 2025 at The Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre on 26 August, 2025. Photograph by Val Adamson

Welcoming Words to JOMBA! 2025: Moving Border/Lands

Opening Night Speech by Dr. Lliane Loots

Here we all are, and it always feels like an impossible miracle that we arrive at this point. Alive, fed, sitting in this beautiful theatre, about to watch bodies fly and leap in poetic affirmations of life and of being alive in this moment.

And it is impossible, as we consider a world closing borders, of the Global North playing bully with global economics, of cities being decimated, while our own continent still reels from legacies of exploitation and colonial interference.

And I am left wondering about the relevance and validity of being an artist — a dancer and choreographer — at this time of facing geopolitics that seems overwhelming in all the vastness (and the minutiae) of ongoing struggles; struggles that seem never to end but which ceaselessly transform and erupt in differing borders and locations.

If we were all Marxists, perhaps we would say that the structures of neo-colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism have never been dismantled and so the cycles continue; that violence sits in these structures.

But what do artists do in the face of these giant structures that silence, dismiss, and painfully commodify, and thus anesthetised what we do?

I think we are reminded that our work is to disrupt — to remind a beleaguered cohort of sister humans — that beauty exists in our subtle and powerfully small voices and bodies to protest. This protest can be overt and polemic, but it can also be the protest of moving — and being moved — by a body that speaks impossible truth to power.

This is what dance is to me as I stand here with you tonight on the Southern tip of Africa.

I lean into the words of Palestinian poet, Mosab Abu Toha, who, in his acceptance of his recent Pulitzer Prize for poetry, spoke about himself as a wordsmith whose work is to witness — and narrate — the extermination of his people.

The pain of the storyteller is to not look away. What is then being asked of us as audience, for is not the act of coming to the theatre, a space to observe and listen; to witness?

Mosab Abu Toha offers, in one of my favourite of his poems, THINGS YOU MAY FIND HIDDEN IN MY EAR, a poem which he dedicates to his medical doctor:

I.

When you open my ear, touch it gently.

My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.

Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium

when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.

You may encounter songs in Arabic,

poems in English I recite to myself,

or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.

When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my ear.

Put them back in order, as you would do with books on your shelf.

II.

The drone’s buzzing sound,

the roar of an F-16,

the screams of bombs falling on houses,

on fields, and on bodies,

of rockets flying away —

rid my small ear canal of them all.

Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision.

Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up.

Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance with yours,

my doctor, day and night.

I am left wondering if, more than anything at this time, being an artist is being a doctor of some sort, a healer, — of bringing, as Toha says, ‘life into our veins to wake us up’.

And so, I welcome you to this year’s 27th JOMBA! — a place of disruption, but also of collective healing, where we have curated a series of dance encounters around the theme or provocation of “MOVING BORDER/LANDS”.

In our dance we cross geographical borders but, more significantly, the borders of our imagination, of our beliefs and our identities, and maybe in this moment become an imagined community in a world where we open the borders that we are told we must hide inside of, to be safe, borders over whom many are dying … let us witness each other so our minds, bodies and hearts, may dance with one another — day and night.

I welcome you all tonight on behalf of the Centre for Creative Arts and the University of KwaZulu-Natal, to the opening of our 27th JOMBA! Festival, and I can think of no greater healer to open our festival than our 2025 Legacy Artist, Sbonakaliso Ndaba.

The JOMBA! Legacy Artist is an annual honourific our festival gives to a significant dance maker in South Africa each year; someone who, due to the powerful longevity of their career, we feel deserves the spotlight. Sbo — now living and working in Cape Town — is of course, originally from Durban, so it feels good to be bringing her home to celebrate her. I have had the privilege of dancing with her, choreographing with her, and of calling her “friend,” and her work is so deeply about healing that I cannot imagine any artist more appropriate to open our festival tonight. Her work tonight is called “IN SEARCH OF OUR HUMANITY,” and while it navigates the history and memory of our own South Africa, it feels like a rallying zeitgeist cry that reminds us of what is important at this time on planet Earth.

We have an incredible festival of moving border crossings as we welcome artists from Spain, the Ivory Coast, Uganda, Reunion, France, Germany, and all the distant spaces inside our own South Africa.

In particular, I thank the Embassy of Spain for partnering with us for our special JOMBA! SPANISH FOCUS, where we welcome Spanish artists who have a unique connection to Africa, from Taiat Dansa in Valencia, to Oulouy, born in the Ivory Coast but living in Spain. These kinds of unique and beautiful partnerships make border crossings simpler and celebrate a rich imagined community of artistic struggle and protest.

We welcome Hannah Ma working with FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY, Didier Boutina, Matthieu Nieto — our 2025 artist in residence, Desire Davids, Company Dans6t — a collaboration with Durban’s Alliance Francais, Uganda’s Joseph Tebandeke, and in our ongoing collaboration with the Market Theatre, we welcome Greg Homann and Sunnyboy Mandla Moutau and Moving into Dance.

And, for our 2nd JOMBA! annual PHAKAMISA Dance Commission, jointly awarded with the Market Theatre, and this year also in partnership with the National Arts Festival and the Standard Bank Young Artists for 2025. This PHAKAMISA Dance Commission is set up to support innovative and provocative South African dance-makers, and so we welcome Soweto-born Asanda Ruda to close our festival.

We also continue to offer three open application platforms that encourage young, developing and professional artists to showcase their work.

The JOMBA! LIVE OPEN HORIZONS is a platform that provides an opportunity for choreographers to present their work in a professional environment with the support of a full technical team, and the JOMBA! YOUTH OPEN HORIZONS, in partnership with The Stable Theatre, features 9 new works from youth groups from all over KZN — it is always my most favourite event of the festival.

JOMBA! also remains the only African dance festival that continues to support digital screen dance-making as we offer a digital programme that includes dance films by Matthieu Nieto and Joseph Tebandeke, and the JOMBA! Digital Open Horizons competition — all free, so please look at your programmes for launch dates.

Our 27th anniversary also heralds the 3rd year of our partnership with the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, as we present (post our Durban festival) a five-day shared platform called JOMBA! @ the MARKET THEATRE, where we move some of the festival’s curated works onto the Gauteng platform.

I draw attention also to a first for JOMBA!, our amazing FEMALE FORWARD dance residency, which has been set up to support the development of young women in dance in KZN. Led by Thobile Maphanga and Gaby Saranouffi, the residency focuses on technical dance training, professional development, and building a strong work ethic. Through a very competitive audition and application process, we accepted five amazing dancers. Our thanks, too, to Laurium Capital, who came on board to sponsor this amazing programme.

Curated and led by Thobile Maphanga, our JOMBA! FORGING FUTURES panel discussion is an amazing full-day event this year and focuses on interrogating what a festival in Africa should look like and be doing, and offers much-needed provocations around what art spaces need to be and how they best serve.

We have workshops, almost already fully booked, panel discussions, and wonderful spaces to engage the choreographers in ‘JOMBA! TALKS DANCE’ sessions. It’s a full 13 days, an immersion, and we hope you will find your way home with us!

As Dr Ismail Mahomed has so kindly thanked our funders and partners already, I take the last few moments to offer some personal thanks:

We thank our School of the Arts and our Dean Nobuhle Hlongwa, and our College of Humanities here at UKZN for the incredible support given to the Centre for Creative Arts and to JOMBA!

We, as JOMBA! and the CCA, thank the glorious Sneddon Theatre, Jackie Cunniffe, and her team. The Sneddon Theatre has been our home for 27 years, and this is a lifetime of love and care that we thank you for.

I thank, too, a small but glorious team of people (family in many ways) who sit with me to make all of this possible,

· Wesley Maherry and the JOMBA! Technical crew for being around to hold our dance work so carefully,

· Val Adamson for being our eyes as she takes images of our bodies in motion and whose work has become one of the deep-lasting legacies of 27 years of JOMBA!,

· Sharlene Versveld for being a publicist who understands kindness, empathy, and ethics — and who has given JOMBA! its amazing presence. I am so glad we could honour her incredible lifetime of work and service to JOMBA!

· I thank Clare Craighead for running our JOMBA! UKZN graduate dance writing residency, and for producing our JOMBA! Khuluma digital newspaper and online blog. This year also joined by Marcia Mzindle.

· I acknowledge and thank Thobile Maphanga, the JOMBA! Project manager and assistant curator. I thank her for her passionate insights. I thank her for her deep caring and love for all that makes up this festival.

· I acknowledge the amazing CCA team who, sitting in the back row tonight, are the real reason we are here. From finance, to guest relations, to picking up dropped balls with love and grace, I especially thank you all for the long hours and for the care taken. There is a full team, but in particular, I thank;

• Siphindile

• Bash

• Kholeka

• Mbali

• Philisiwe

• Ayanda

• Andisa

• Thalente

· I personally offer my thanks to Dr Ismail Mahomed for his continued inspired leadership of the CCA, for his compassion and infinite support, for his politics and for his fight that never dims, and quite simply, for making all our lives better. He hovers, with his big angel wings, over the artists of this city, and the artists of this country, with such love and understanding — thank you, Ismail!

· And, from me, a thank you to the seven dancers of FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY who have hung on, fought, danced, and made it very easy for me to always remember the power of dissident border crossings.

Finally, I return to Palestinian poet — Mosab Abu Toha — who, in the face of genocide, writes (in his love and painful remembrance of the very ordinary and the everyday);

Memories are Flowers — We water them, narrate them, turn them into poems into plays, **into dance, into stories.**

No matter how deeply inhumed the bones, the worms of sweet memories shall find their way.

Don’t ever be surprised to see a rose shoulder up among the ruins of the house: This is how we survived.

Once again — in this moment of our personal and collective histories — where you have chosen to be here tonight in this theatre, to watch and witness dance and the powerful and political stories of the body; … and I think this too is how we survive (almost unbearable at times), but it is a solidarity with hope and courage.

Welcome to JOMBA!