Marco da Silva Ferreira + Amala Dianor / Via Katlehong

Founded in 1992, the Via Katlehong dance company, led by Buru Mohlabane and Steven Faleni, was named after the East Rand township, a poor district where pantsula counter-culture was born. With its strong community identity, Via Katlehong Dance pursues an educative, cultural, and social mission with the youth of South Africa. The company has received several international awards for its creations bringing together pantsula traditions and other South African dances like gumboot and step. Like hip hop in the United States and in Europe, pantsula culture is a lifestyle and includes fashion, music, dance, as well as body language and slang. Those dances are performed with a shared energy and rhythm. By shouting, whistling, stomping their feet, and clapping, the audience takes part in the celebration, symbol of a certain lust for life. The dancers of Via Katlehong regularly invite international choreographers to work with them, such as Marco da Silva Ferreira and Amala Dianor this year.

Marco da Silva Ferreira — førma Inførma

My training as a dancer and artist was initially based on dances of African-American origin (popping, new style, krump, house dance) and also kuduro, a style from Angola. And although in the recent years my research has focused a lot on elements of clubbing, it is still related to the social sense/meaning of dance or the construction of a collective identity through dance. I am more and more eager to reactivate a fanciful/ghostly composition and to make it dialogue with Via Katlehong.— Marco da Silva Ferreira

Amala Dianor — Emaphakathini

My work is based on a process of cross-fertilisation. By that I mean a way of pushing back borders, of displacing lines of separation to create new mixed spaces, these "in-betweens" to be probed. Faced with the history of South Africa, I want to focus on this principle of movement and abolition of borders. My intention is to draw on the personalities and individual histories of each of the Via Katlehong performers as well as on our encounter. I will look for these “in-betweens” spanning traditional and urban dance, this time drawing on the technical heritage of the gumboots and pantsula dances deployed in South Africa. — Amala Dianor