The force of NATURE

 

Association Noa

From Soweto


Vincent Sekwati Koko Mantsoe’s recognition as a choreographer demonstrates that to be successfully integrated into the performance arena as a contemporary artist, one does not have to disavow one’s cultural heritage. Growing up in Diepkloof, one of the South Western Townships outside Johannesburg known as Soweto, Mantsoe’s innately musical understanding of movement and its transformational potential was founded in the early years. When still a boy he would assist in the dancing and drumming that his grandmother, his mother, and two of his aunts performed in their capacity as ‘Sangomas’, which is the Zulu term for traditional healers.

Sangoma


The Sangoma ceremonies involve the shifting of body and mind into a state of trance, from where the ancestral spirits may be consulted for guidance in curing physical and psychological disorders. Growing up in Soweto in the late 1970s and 80s also meant going to school at a time when education of black children held an ultimately low in the priorities of the Apartheid government. As a result Mantsoe’s spent a substantial part of his teenage years practicing the 1980s styles of township street dancing, which combined popular African dance forms with influences from American pop culture picked up from videos, such as Michael Jackson’s. In the township peer group, with whom Mantsoe performed as The Joy Dancers, was also Gregory Maqoma, who has since earned acclaim as a contemporary choreographer in his right.

Moving Into Dance


Both Mantsoe and Maqoma were in 1990 accepted into the newly established trainee program of Moving Into Dance Mophatong (MIDM), one of the first integrated dance companies in South Africa. From being a ‘punk with a perm’ Mantsoe turned an ambitious student, immersing himself into the discipline of formal dance training, while discovering his creative powers in solving choreographic tasks. Having had little academic training, he would battle with assignments in subjects such as the history and anthropology of dance. Still under the mentorship of MIDM founder and artistic director Sylvia Glasser, his education was further nurtured through exposure to the world outside South Africa. Among the formative contexts, which came to bear influence on Mantsoe’s artistic approach and provide him with movement inspiration, were residencies with NAISDA (The National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association) in Australia in the early 1990s. Here he was introduced to movement philosophies embodied in traditional dance forms from Australia and Asia such as Balinese dance. Another important chapter in his learning process was undertaken as a dancer in Glasser’s choreographies, most notably in Tranceformations (1991), based on the trance dance of the San people of the Kalahari Desert as depicted in their rock art. As explained by Mantsoe, whose own ancestral heritage combines influences from Zulu, Pedi, Xhosa, Venda and Shangaan dance, the preoccupation with the spiritual life of the San taught him the importance of humbleness when engaging with dance forms not his own. Describing the work on Glasser’s choreography as a turning point, Mantsoe recalls it as the moment when he realized how he could make choreographic use of the ancestral knowledge embedded in the dance, he had known since childhood.