Gregory Maqoma | Thuthuka Sibisi (South Africa)

Gregory Maqoma

Gregory Vuyani Maqoma became interested in dance in the late 1980s as a means to escape the growing political tensions growing in Soweto, South Africa, where he was born. He started his formal dance training in 1990 at Moving into Dance, where he, later, became the Associate Artistic Director in 2002. He founded Vuyani Dance Theatre (VDT) in 1999 while undertaking a scholarship at the Performing Arts Research and Training School (PARTS) in Belgium, under the direction of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. Maqoma has established himself as an internationally renowned dancer, choreographer, teacher, and director.

In 2002, Maqoma received the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for dance and was a finalist in the Daimler Chrysler Choreography Award. He was a finalist in the Rolex Mentorship Programme in 2003. Several works in his repertoire have won him accolades and international acclaim, including the Tunkie Award for Leadership in Dance (2012), and a “Bessie”, New York City’s premier dance award for Exit/Exist for original music composition (2014). He served as a nominator in the 2016-2017 Rolex Arts Initiative as well as curating the 2017 Main Dance Programme for the National Arts Festival.

The French government honoured Maqoma with the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Arts & Literature) Award in 2017. The following year, 2018, Maqoma collaborated with William Kentridge as a choreographer and performer in “The Head and the Load,” an opera which premiered at the Tate Modern Gallery in London, and is still touring Europe, and the United States.

Recently, he collaborated with Idris Elba and Kwame Kwei-Armah in the production, “Tree,” produced by Manchester International Festival and the Young Vic (2018). In 2020, Maqoma was honoured to deliver the prestigious International Dance Day message under the auspices of the International Theatre Institute and UNESCO.

Thuthuka Sibisi

Thuthuka Sibisi is a composer and musician based in Johannesburg, South Africa. His musical career began at a young age, at the world-renowned Drakensberg Boy’s Choir School. Here, his passion for music was nurtured. While studying music he also had interest in Physical Theatre and Movement, learning alongside Sam Prigge and Estelle Olivier. He graduated with a Bachelor of Music from Stellenbosch University in 2011. He completed his MA in Performance Making  at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.

Sibisi has toured extensively, performing throughout South Africa as well as Asia, Europe and the Americas. Works toured as Musical Director of Philip Miller’s opera Between A Rock and A Hard Place (premiere, Stockholm) in collaboration with the Cape Town Opera. Further, he was Associate Conductor and Chorus Master for Bongani Ndonana-Breen’s oratoria Credo, which was written to commemorate UNISA’s 140th anniversary of its founding. Other engagements include Chorus Master for UCT Opera School: Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Reims and Four:30 – South African Operas. For Cape Town Opera’s ’17-18 season of Vliegendende Hollaânder he served as Associate Director.

Not only does Sibisi have interest in music but he too has fostered an interest in art, combing music and visual aesthetics. He has worked on art collaborations with multiple visual artists including, Johannesburg-based photographer and sculptor, Jake Singer, Joburg City Hustle (2015) and Intersections To This City (2014) – presented at Sustainable Empires (Venice, Italy) and Los Angeles Centre for Digital Art (USA).  Other exhibition work includes the performance installation Extracts from The Underground (2013) – presented in collaboration with Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (RSA). This installation was later presented at Wits Art Museum in 2014 as part of The Migrant Journey Series. In 2016 a sound and image installation The African Choir 1891 Re-imagined was presented as part of the Black Chronicles Archive Laboratory at Autograph ABP (London), University of Johannesburg’s VIAD FADA (Johannesburg, RSA), Iziko South African Museum (Cape Town, RSA) and The Apartheid Museum (Johannesburg, RSA) curated by Renée Mussai.

Sibisi is a collaborative composer and musician working as Musical Director to Philip Miller’s Pulling Numbers (premiere, China) and performed as Musical Director for Ciné-Concert presented as part of Notes Toward a Model Opera by William Kentridge. 2016 also saw Sibisi make his Italian debut as Music Director and co-composer for William Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments to be presented in Rome, Italy. Further projects include a commission by Cape Town Opera for Musiques Sacrées d’Afrique et d’Europe, in residence at Festival International d’Aix-en-Provence (France). He has ongoing collaboration with Philip Miller and William Kentridge as both Musical Director and co-composer for The Head and The Load which premiered in 2018 at London’s The Tate Modern (UK) subsequently touring to Park Avenue Armory (NYC), Holland Festival (Netherlands) and the Ruhrtriennale (Germany).

He is a recipient of the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans (2017, RSA), Ampersand Foundation Fellow (2018, NYC), American Academy in Berlin resident (2019, Germany), Bushwick Center resident (2019, NYC), Goethe Institut resident fellow (2019, Germany) and Performa Curatorial Fellow (2019, NYC).

Sibisi co-created Broken Chord alongside choreographer and dancer Gregory Maqoma which premiered at Grec Festival de Barcelona (2020).

Between 1891-1893 a group of young African singers travelled by boat to Britain, Canada and America. This ensemble of the missionary-educated black elite, named The African (Native) Choir, were on a mission to raise funds for a technical school in Kimberley, South Africa. Using traditional Xhosa and contemporary dance styles alongside atmospheric soundscapes, we weave together recorded personal accounts of the African Choir, revealing a drama of truly global dimensions, whilst simultaneously looking at the black body as a political site. Further, questioning the relationship between the colonised and the coloniser; and either’s complicity in shaping and shifting a South African narrative – past and present. Broken Chord not only reflects on an archive but looks to trigger, critique and comment on urgent issues of migration, dispossession, borders and paths of forced closure – a deliberate and disturbing gesture on the part of the West against the other. 

We come from, and have been taught in, a music and movement tradition that stipulates itself according to this binary of the West vs the other. What then comes to the fore is how the West concretely safeguards itself and its boundaries. We want to disrupt this positioning by planting ourselves at the centre of this dichotomy thus becoming the friction that can summon, envision and engender a newer, more original conversation concerned with sonic-gestured worlds: who do we write these worlds for; whose stories are we to tell through these movements, sounds and text practices? Ultimately, this work serves as a deliberate and fiercely subjective act of self-beatification. 

In this work we focus on the voice not only as a bearer of loss, hope, wisdom, and affection but also as an instrument of witnessing – of seeing and re-membering. What makes this work unique is the origin of the musical material – renderings and sketches adopted from a meagre and faint program of songs. From this arises a severe provocation; encouraging a want to dance, dart, ripple and rip apart; a desire to dive deep and far into imagining what these songs looked, tasted, sounded  and felt like. Central to this we find our instigator; the messenger, the saviour, the destructor, the disembodied figure of a broken past.

Vanessa Richards works as a transdisciplinary artist facilitator initiating cultural projects that move us towards life affirming change. She brings this practice to her work in social enterprise as a co-producer/facilitator for the Social Venture Institute with Hollyhock Leadership Institute. At Simon Fraser University she is an Associate of the SFU  Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, and an instructor in the Community Capacity Building Certificate. While developing SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement she founded and was songleader for the Woodward’s Community Singers, a drop-in choir for 11 years until the current pandemic. She believes in you.

James (Jim) Smith, DanceHouse Co-Founder, Artistic and Executive Director

Following studies in music and then commerce, Jim worked in tourism for the Government of Ontario. In 1990 he moved to Montreal and began working in the professional Canadian arts sector at La La La Human Steps. After a move to Vancouver, Jim co-founded Eponymous, an arts management and production agency. Under the aegis of Eponymous, Jim is currently associated with Company 605, Compagnie Vision Selective, Kidd Pivot, Les Productions Figlio, Wen Wei Dance, and Vancouver New Music. He also represents Veda Hille, Crystal Pite and Wen Wei Wang. In 2007 Jim co-founded and is the current Artistic and Executive Director of DanceHouse, a subscription series of large-scale dance presentations at the Vancouver Playhouse. Jim is a past President of the Canadian Dance Assembly, a founding member of Made In BC. He is currently on the board of the Vancouver Recital Society and the Canadian Arts Presenting Association (CAPACOA) where he is the chair of the newly formed International Market Development Committee.

Kari Turunen is the Artistic Director of the professional Vancouver Chamber Choir since the beginning of the 2019/20 season. Before moving to Vancouver, he played a major role in choral music in Finland as a conductor, teacher of conducting, singer, clinician, administrator, adjudicator and lecturer. Concert tours and teacher, clinician and adjudicator assignments regularly took him around Europe and Asia. His choirs and ensembles won numerous prizes both in Finland and abroad.

Kari Turunen was educated at the University of Helsinki and the Sibelius Academy where he studied choral conducting (MA). He holds a doctorate in early music performance practice from the University of the Arts, Helsinki. In addition to his artistic activities, Kari Turunen has been active in many festivals, of late, mainly as an Artistic Director. He was the Artistic Director of the annual Aurore Renaissance Festival in Helsinki 2015–2020 and the Finnish-Swedish Song Celebration in Helsinki in June 2022 and is the AD of the Tampere Vocal Music Festival in 2023. He even has a shady past in administration and served as chair of the Finnish Choral Directors’ Association (FCDA) for almost 20 years and was the Executive Director of a national choral organization for six years in his youth. He now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada).