Looking back to move forward: celebrating 20 years of an innovative contemporary African dance company

Dance in South Africa is as complex as the diversity of cultures in her country. It reflects the nuances of socio-cultural mores that shape the ever-changing South African nation. The wealth of cultures and identities in South Africa pose an exciting challenge for many artists, particularly those located in the dance faculties, to define and articulate what is contemporary about South African dance and what is African about contemporary dance. The challenge towards normative and codified rigidities in dance practice and discourse functions as an unconventional entry by the Vuyani Dance Company (VDC) to embrace innovative and hybrid forms and modes of embodied representations through dance. The publication of Looking Back to Move Forward (2019) divulges the many ways the dance theatre of Gregory Maqoma – founder of Vuyani Dance Theatre (VDT) and VDC – innovates fresh movement vocabularies. It chronicles the practice of locating the self as a point of departure to excavating and performing embodied narratives about personal experiences that converge with societal histories. The meeting place between the private and the communal serves as the driving force of Maqoma’s success in making dance theatre. The book sheds light on Maqoma’s practice of embracing nostalgia and imagination to create future thinking narratives while inspiring lasting legacies. Looking Back to Move Forward (2019) performs two functions. Firstly, it cements the understanding that contemporary African dance is complex and transformative. The nature ofMaqoma’s method of creating dance theatre is celebrated in the book as it invites readers to journey through 20 years of a successful Black conceived and owned dance company in South Africa. In this layered, the distinct refusal to rigidities in dance practice has prompted a need to innovate Black orientated contemporary African dance. As evidenced in the book, the company achieved this by appreciating the multiplicious nature of Maqoma’s choreography that applies influences from the South, East, and West to formulate individual and interpersonal narratives of collective experiences. Furthermore, the book sheds light on Maqoma’s practice of examining the position of blackness in contemporary dance within the postcolonial African context. Finally, it provides frames of reference that reorientate contemporary African dance away from troubling labels such as ‘primitive’ or the homogenizing ‘ritual’ or ‘authentically African’ markers.