When Bodies Refuse to Surrender - JOMBA! review South Africa

September 10, 2026
by: Khethiwe Penelope Shozi

Sometimes the hero is not the body that stands alone. Sometimes it is the community that refuses to surrender.

That idea framed Introdans’ HEROES programme on 5 September, the penultimate night of the 28th JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience. Across four works, resistance appeared in different forms: surviving separation, refusing control, allowing tenderness, and building a community in which different bodies could move together.

The excerpt from Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s In Memoriam begins beneath grey clouds. A woman in white and pointe shoes moves with a male partner while the projected sky seems to change alongside their relationship. When she leaves, his body appears to lose its centre. He rolls and rocks across the floor before she returns at a distance. The scene made dependence visible without romanticising it: another person can ground us, but their absence can also reveal how precarious that grounding has become.

Zinhle Nzama’s Brightest Darkness shifts from dependence towards control. Nzama begins inside a sharply defined rectangle of light, repeatedly trying to stand and move beyond it. Her duet with Sbonga Ndlovu becomes increasingly unsettling as intimacy and force entangle. He pulls, pushes and covers her face; she repeatedly resists.

I read the duet as a struggle over space and agency, but I would stop short of fixing it as a literal portrait of one abusive relationship. What the choreography makes unmistakable is the physical difference between contact that supports and contact that constrains.

That distinction becomes important in Mano a mano by Iratxe Ansa and Igor Bacovich. Two men meet inside a widening field of light. Their duet carries confidence, physical closeness and care without turning tenderness into weakness. When a rose descends and is shared between them, masculinity is allowed another vocabulary: softness, vulnerability and affection.

IUNGO then expands intimacy into collective practice.

The screen shows bodies gathering outdoors before the filmed world seems to open into the live stage. Introdans, FLATFOOT Dance Company and guest performers move through leaning, carrying, resting, skating and supporting. Joseph Tebandeke moves with and without crutches. The choreography does not ask the audience to admire him for ‘overcoming’ disability. Instead, mobility devices, different physical capacities and trained dance bodies become part of one shared choreographic ecology.

That is where IUNGO becomes politically interesting. Inclusion is not represented as everyone doing the same thing. Belonging is created because difference is allowed to remain visible.

The performers rest on one another. Hands meet hands. A body is lifted and lowered. A skateboard becomes another way of travelling through the space. Eventually the dancers return, one by one, to the screen from which they appeared.

Watching them disappear, I was struck by how much of the evening had been about boundaries: between two people, between control and care, between masculinity and tenderness, between screen and stage, between the categories through which bodies are usually read.

HEROES did not erase those boundaries by pretending difference had disappeared. It repeatedly asked what relationships become possible when bodies refuse domination but remain open to connection.

Perhaps that is where the programme met JOMBA!’s idea of disruptive presencing most clearly.

Resistance was not only standing alone.

It was refusing to be controlled, allowing yourself to be vulnerable, and continuing to build a world in which another body can move beside yours.

HEROES has one last performance in the John Kani Theatre at The Market Theatre tonight, 10 September, 7pm. Tickets are available via Webtickets.