Portals and Petals: The Subtle Alchemy of My Grandmother’s Dreams, Dance
Next Performance: 01 July 2025, 20:00
Venue: Rhodes Theatre
Review
By Karabo Matalajoe
Some performances entertain, and then some reach deep within you and touch your spirit. This recent artwork by Musa Hlatshwayo definitely moved me, even as someone who has not experienced contemporary dance before. This was not just a performance but a crossover into a different realm of remembrance.
“The piece is in honour of my grandmother, she was a healer and a matriarch,” Hlatshwayo says. “She was the inspiration in terms of the work coming to life.”
The performance opens with a fog scene, which is very thick, heavy, and dreamlike. This serves as a visual and spiritual context, drawing us into the haziness of dreams, memory and ancestral presence. “Sleeping is a portal, you’re going into this world where things happen whether you remember them or not – that world is real.” The decision was deliberate to create ambience.
As the dancers emerge through the fog, twisting limbs, bodies dropping and rising, moving in correspondence, they evoke the balancing act of identity between growing up in a church and also sharing the spiritual side of being in indumba, intuition, the seen and the sensed. “I was born into a deeply Christian family, but my grandmother was a healer,” he recalls. “Eventually, I had to learn there’s nothing wrong with either, but something is wrong when one denies the other.
Portals and Petals is a reflection of Hlatswayo’s upbringing, his lineage and all the sections of spirituality that shaped his life. Everything from lights, sound, and choreography was precise and deliberate, and it conveyed a sense of transfer through different portals between the realms of the spirits and the living.
“We didn’t start with dancing,” he says. “We started with listening, talking, playing, and questioning. The piece had to be lived into existence.” What makes this a deeply felt experience is that memories of both his traditional spirituality and Christianity collaborate through sound and body movement. The dancers move with purpose, urgency and presence, showing different, shifting ancestral and spiritual energies within the space.
“I hope people take away whatever they feel. It’s intentionally not linear. It’s fragmented, like memory. The point is that you thread your own story too.”
The performance encourages audience members like me to draw their own meanings, to allow us to find ourselves in the space that draws us in.
The technical and physical ambience created a poetic and potentially transformative piece of art. The experience transported me, and I walked out changed.
