Through all its performances, the company Via Katlehong Dance defends the Pantsula culture. In the 60s and 70s, under the apartheid regime in South Africa, black rural populations were displaced to the big cities and regrouped in the townships. In these ghettos, where unemployment and crime prevailed, the Pantsula culture, to which all the youth of the townships are identified, were born.
Like hip hop in the United States and Europe, Pantsula culture is a lifestyle, covering mode, music, dance, gestural codes and talking. And like hip hop, it finds its field of expression in the street. In the 1990s, when South Africa mingled in place, the company Via Katlehong Danse dance protest fight for young slums. The shows combined Pantsula dance – a kind of non-acrobatic hip hop, but virtuoso by its speed, percussive clappers with iron shoes, and the gumboot, a dance of miners wearing wellington boots.
This workshop is an introduction to these dances and an opportunity to meet a dance culture made of shouting, whistling and stamping out! It isa party full of dynamism and fury of life.
Information:
Time: 11:00-13:00
Date: Saturday 04.11.23
For: The workshop is open for everybody
Registration: Follow this link (registration deadline is 03.11.23, at 16:00)
The workshop is free
Dressing rooms are not available and there is no space to do individual warm up before the workshop.
BIO:
Buru Isaac Mohlabane is the Creative Artistic Director and Co-Director of the legendary Via Katlehong, which is currently rated amongst the top 5 internationally rated urban dance companies. He was born in 1983 in Katlehong Township in the Eastrand and raised by a single parent mother. From an early age he involved himself in many different activities in his community participating in club soccer and school athletics. In 1996 he joined the company Via Katlehong to learn the dance discipline and began performing in 1997. Soon after his exposure to the possibilities of dance he started to take dance seriously as a career. In 1999 he got an opportunity to perform at the All Africa Games opening and closing ceremonies. He then went on to perform in different cooperate events around South Africa and Europe.