Joy Dancer: dance documentary shows the power of movement to give a voice to the silenced

In 2018, when visiting the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, choreographer Gregory Maqoma came across the multimedia installation The African Choir 1891 Re-imagined (2017).

Created by composers Thuthuka Sibisi and Philip Miller and curated by Renee Mussai, the installation tells the story of a group of South African singers who toured Britain, Canada and America between 1891 and 1893, raising money for a missionary school back home.

Moved by the work, Maqoma reached out to Sibisi and the pair decided to collaborate. The result was Broken Chord, another performance piece that tells the story of this group of singers, this time focusing on a recital they performed to Queen Victoria in 1891.

Broken Chord explores the issues of migration, borders and colonialism and calls attention to how the experiences of the African Choir singers are still too often the experiences of African artists when touring Britain and America today as racist stereotypes of Africa are still in circulation.

Improvisation, as seen in Joy Dancer. Photo: Suzanne Smith / Supplied

In their documentary film, Joy Dancer, filmmakers Suzanne Smith and Sylvia Solf follow this collaboration, from rehearsals to its final performance in Barcelona.

The film opens with Maqoma dancing in front of The African Choir 1891 Re-imagined in the Apartheid Museum. The moment feels like a dancing dialogue, where Maqoma hears the stories of The African Choir through his body and creates a choreography of the past and present.

There are moments when he is still, moments when his body shakes. There are moments when his body reverberates as the choir’s voices shape his movement and moments when the movement of his body seems to shape the voices of the choir.

As South African art critics Bongeka Gumede and Kimberley Schoeman wrote in their review of Broken Chord, through his performance, Maqoma is able to “amplify voices of those who have been marginalised, those from whom everything had been taken, except for their voices, culture and traditions”.

https://youtu.be/cHVybkmeXHg

The storytellers

Joy Dancer is not a film simply about the making of the performance of Broken Chord. Rather, this is a film where Maqoma the “joy dancer”, a nickname from his childhood, shares how he tells stories through dance. Not just his own stories, but also those that have been hidden and silenced by colonialism, much like the stories of The African Choir singers.

At a key moment in the film, Maqoma says: “We are storytellers, let us do that. It’s our job to tell stories, through voice, through the body, through action, through text. That’s all we have to do. Tell a story.”

This is a powerful statement. It made me reflect on how audiences listen to a story, and how, perhaps, audiences from the global north only want to hear the types of African stories that reduce the continent to a stereotype. Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explored the same idea in her 2009 Ted Talk The Danger of the Single Story.

Gregory Maqoma and dancers in Joy Dancer. Photo: Suzanne Smith / Supplied

Broken Chord performance. Photo: Suzanne Smith / Supplied

The film also shows the large group of creative people who were needed to tell the story of the African Choir in Broken Chord. Telling stories is never a solo endeavour and there is never a single storyteller either. The audience also needs to do some work.

In the film, when Maqoma says, “We allow the audience to walk away and they can ask themselves questions”, as audience members, we need to ask how many stories we have been complicit in silencing or reducing ourselves – and how we can learn to be better listeners. DM 

This story was first published in The Conversation. Sarahleigh Castelyn is a Professor of Performing Arts at the University of East London.

Joy Dancer had a world premiere in the UK at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in August 2024 and is set to premiere in South Africa, though no date has been confirmed.