In the South African eighties, the suburbs of the town of Katlehong, where, as in so many other cities, the black population had been expelled in the sixties, became a hot zone for the anti-apartheid uprising. Unemployment and crime turned it into a bloody land from which an explosive culture emerged: pantsula, the name given to the city’s rebellious youth. Each suburb had its own, which encompassed fashion, music, dance and a lifestyle that found its stage in the street to articulate anguish, joy… all of this codified in specific steps.
To keep the city’s youth away from violence, the Via Katlehong community dance company was created there in 1992. Led by Steven Faleni and Buru Mohlabane, today the group includes a community school and 18 professional dancers specializing in pantsula, a high-energy urban dance that performs other neo-traditional forms, such as tap pantsula, step and gumboot, the miner’s dance. in which thighs and calves are hit.
Accompanied by kwaito music, these dances have left the suburbs to take over stages around the world. The Mercat de les Flors welcomes you this weekend in Barcelona (13 and 14) with a show titled Via Injabulo that includes two pieces, one by the Portuguese Marco da Silva Ferreira and another by the Franco-Senegalese choreographer Amala Dianor and performed by eight dancers.
“I talk about mission and liberation based on rhythms that beat in South Africa,” says Dianor, a choreographer with a brilliant career. “I look for those intermediates between traditional and urban dance, and explore the personalities of those dancers from Via Katlehong.” After his beginnings as a hip-hop dancer, Dianor trained at the National Center for Contemporary Dance in Angers, absorbing styles ranging from hip-hop to neoclassical or Afro-contemporary dance. In 2012 he created his own company.
For his part, Marco da Silva Ferreira (Santa Maria de Feira, 1986) graduated as a physiotherapist while becoming a professional dancer. The author of HU (R) MANO (2013) or Bisonte (2019) tried here to review his previous creations to “understand what motivated Via Katlehong’s invitation.”
He had never been to South Africa and his training as an artist was based more on dances of African American origin (popping, new style, krump, house dance, etc.) and also on kuduro, a style from Angola. Furthermore, in recent years she had investigated disco dancing and the construction of a collective identity through dance. She also imagined the bodies only as skeletons. In fact, Via Katlehong’s technique is isi’pantsula, a Zulu term that means moving with your ass out… And with all these elements, including house dance and top rock, Ferreira enters into a rhythmic dialogue with the South African company .
