On a small black-and-white television set in a township on the East Rand, a young boy watched Michael Jackson defy gravity. The screen flickered; the world shifted. “It was like a revolution for me,” Gregory Maqoma recalls. Until then, his education in movement had come from weekends spent watching his grandfather’s peers compete in traditional dance, with their boots striking dust and their bodies charged with rhythm. Jackson came like an electric shock: here was a black man commanding global adoration with his unique style and audacity.
Maqoma began fusing what he saw on that tiny screen with the traditional forms that pulsed through his childhood. It was the beginning of a language that would carry him from township halls to world stages. His father, sternly insisting he read the newspaper aloud each day, inadvertently redirected him toward his destiny. Paging through one afternoon, Maqoma spotted an audition notice. In 1990, he auditioned for the legendary Sylvia Glasser and was accepted. Dance, once an escape, became a calling. His grandmother’s quiet intervention, “Let him try” — sealed it.
More than three decades later, the founder of Vuyani Dance Theatre returns to a stage he calls home with Genesis, a new dance opera which was on at The Baxter Theatre until this weekend and transfers to Joburg Theatre in March. If his recent works, Exit/Exist and Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Boléro, confirmed his status as one of SA’s most vital choreographers, Genesis feels like a reckoning.
He describes it as confronting time itself. “Time isn’t linear,” he says. “It moves back and forth. We must go back and retrieve what we missed.” In Genesis, Maqoma grapples with leadership, ego and collapse. He references revolutionary thinkers like Steve Biko, Frantz Fanon and the vast, often obscured intellectual histories of the African continent. Timbuktu’s ancient manuscripts float in his imagination. “What knowledge,” he wonders, “was buried or bypassed in the colonial retelling of history? What might happen if we began again?
This isn’t polemic. It’s poetry in motion. Genesis is a 70-minute “dance opera” — movement driving the narrative, music and text forming its structure. The libretto by Karthika Nair threads lyricism through live music performed by Mthwakazi Chosi, Annalyzer, Yogin Sulaphin and Xolilisle Bongwana under the musical direction of Nhlanhla Mahangu. Poetry, delivered by Anelisa Phewa, becomes the spine of the storytelling.
The tropes of opera are traditionally love and tragedy, mystery and downfall, and Maqoma embraces those elements. But this is an opera untethered from European convention. The dancers sing. They speak. They act. They embody a narrative that’s both structured and porous, open to interpretation. “We want the audience to travel,” he says. “It’s a voyage.”
The production’s visual world deepens the journey. Costumes by Jacques van der Watt of the label Black Coffee function as attire but also as scaffolding — framing bodies and shaping space. Maqoma asked van der Watt to imagine a pan-African promised land: garments echoing North, West and Southern Africa, suggesting a continent re-envisioned beyond colonial borders. The result is sculptural and symbolic, as integral to the storytelling as each gesture.
Longtime collaborator Shannel Winlock-Pailman sits beside him in the rehearsal room, analysing, refining, challenging. “Everyone is there from day one,” Maqoma explains. His creative process is communal; decisions are made collectively. It’s liberating not to carry the burden of authorship alone, he admits. The ensemble of Vuyani Dance Theatre, which he founded in 1999, has toured to over 100 cities across five continents, but here they’re asked to stretch further: to merge athleticism with vocal discipline merge athleticism with vocal discipline— and to navigate the emotional architecture of opera while maintaining the visceral punch of contemporary African dance.
Thematically, Genesis pivots on the fragility of empire. Leaders build monuments to legacy; empires crumble. “Ego is destructive,” he says. “What if we built differently? What if we rebuilt from the ground up, collectively?” The work doesn’t offer escapism. It sits squarely in the turbulence of our moment — climate crises, migration, technological anxiety. It asks how we might begin again, changing things with courage.
Despite international accolades (from the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres to multiple national awards), Maqoma remains anchored to community. The Baxter and Joburg Theatre aren’t just prestigious venues; they’re homes. But he speaks as warmly of township theatres where audiences engage directly.
“Our stories are the same,” he reflects. “What makes us different is the rhythm and the resilience.” His choreography carries that cadence, born of traditional forms, sharpened by global exposure but unmistakably South African.
What does he want you to leave with?
“Hope”, he says — and then lists the daily litany: water crisis, AI crisis, immigration crisis, the new panic that replaces yesterday’s panic before the kettle’s boiled. “Theatre”, he insists, “shouldn’t be escapism. It should be the opposite: a room where we face the mess and still ask, ‘How do I begin?’”
Genesis doesn’t offer salvation. It offers a restart in a bruised but ultimately communal and stubbornly beautiful world. And in a world addicted to endings, that’s rather radical choreography. For Maqoma, that black-and-white television has become a global stage, but the impulse stays the same: to move, to imagine, to begin again.
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