My Body My Space - Back @Home, Ekhaya Emakhazeni

FATC and LEAP Works at Pop Up Community Showcases

#MBMS22 #AFestivalOfGreetingsAndMeetings

My Body My Space 2022

March 14 – April 14, Emakhazeni, Mpumalanga

Week 6: Back @ Home, Ekhaya Emakhazeni

Be an Anonymous Angel, donate HERE

In this final week of the festival, MBMS puts the spotlight on talent at home, with works coming directly from Ekhaya, FATC’s Ebhudlweni Arts Centre of Excellence base. The week will feature solo showcases from current dance trainees and interns and select works by the young people of FATC’s long-running Local Education in Arts Programme (LEAP).

The showcasing LEAP learners, aged between 5-18 years of age, are celebrating the resurgence of the in-school, after-school and community centre dance classes that have been featured in Emakhazeni and the festival since 2015. Their performances will showcase their exploration of what it is like to say hello again, to encounter one another again, and to finally greet dance again.

Be an Anonymous Angel, donate HERE

LEAP Facilitator Nicholas Aphane says:

“We've greeted one another through song and dance. Over this time we have been able to come back together and share how we have missed one another, and the aspects of LEAP that we longed for during our time apart.

It has been a time for us to LOOK BACK at the previous structure of the programme and the learners’ understandings of the FATC style of contemporary performance; to make sense of NOW, where we are seeing what the movement we have acquired in our years of relative isolation has been, and to make steps to integrate our previous and current selves towards a new LEAP future.

We have developed work around the greeting concept. I created a song that gave us a technical frame by offering specific rhythmic and intonation elements, that the learners could create dance language to.

The song, featuring the greetings ‘Sawubona, Molo, Lotjhani, Ndaa, Hello, Hullo, Avuxeni’ has shown how strong the pop-culture influence is in the dance expression the LEAPers are embodying at the moment. So we have embraced the possibilities in what, at the moment I am calling Commercial-contempo or Contemporary-social dance.

We are hearing one another out, and not just ‘implementing’. We really are meeting one another to be each others’ ‘teachers’.”

Advertise HERE

The Human Rights focused solos of the FATC interns and trainees will engage economic, social and cultural rights issues.

The pop-up community showcases are as follows:

Wednesday 13th in Sakhelwe from 3.30pm at Skosana intersection; Thursday 14th in Emthonjeni from 3.30pm at the Library Intersection.

Partners for #MBMS22 are: DSAC; NAC; BASA; FATC; Oppenheimer Memorial Trust; MP Department of Sports, Culture and Recreation; Emakhazeni Local Municipality; BUZ PR; Creative Feel; Zebra 360 Online Media; Wits: Drama for Life; Moving Into Dance; Unmute Dance Company; Mhayise Productions; Vuyani Dance Theatre; Cie Morphose and Ex Nihilo.