Garage Dance Ensemble: "Krummelpap, Scandals Wrapped with Prayer"
Venue: Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg
Organizations: Garage Dance Ensemble
Date: Thursday, October 12, 2023
Time: 7:30 - 9:00 PM
Event Types: Music, Arts & Theatre
Cost:

Description:
The Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech presents Garage Dance Ensemble performing "Krummelpap, Scandals Wrapped with Prayer" on Wednesday, October 11, 2023 at 9:00 PM and Thursday, October 12, 2023 at 7:30 PM.

Garage Dance Ensemble brings this deeply personal and socially charged contemporary dance-theatre work named for krummelpap, a South African comfort food similar to American grits. Featuring an uncompromising text by award-winning poet Ronelda Kamfer, the movement captures the personal and political circumstances and aspirations of the people of South Africa’s former mining community, Namaqualand.

Laser-focused on its community, Garage Dance Ensemble has rarely left its home turf. Now the five-dancer ensemble is coming to the U.S. for the first time, bringing one of its recent pieces. A work that combines stark poetry and powerful movement, Krummelpap, "Scandals Wrapped in Prayer" (originally Krummelpap, Afval en Sunlightseepbaddens) showcases the company’s unique approach to tell the stories of young people reckoning with the stigmas, violence, and rage of a damaged and disenfranchised community.

"Scandals" is the ensemble’s most recent work created through a process of collective choreography. At its heart lies a long, searing, and wide-ranging poem by South African literary star Kamfer, commissioned by Garage Dance Ensemble. Both words and movement vocabulary speak the local language, without flourishes and theatrical trappings.

For the production’s U.S. debut tour, the original text, written in a dialect of Afrikaans, will be translated by the author and presented in English.

Garage Dance Ensemble searingly unites vernacular movement and uncompromising poetry. Knock-out Northern Cape-based company centers the lives of young South Africans and the legacies they bear with a deeply personal and socially charged dance-theater work.

Garage Dance Ensemble is adept at creating from absence, at mounting rich and riveting performances in blank spaces like community halls. Making art meant to merge and reflect its community, Garage’s work is essential by necessity – and by choice. It’s immediate and raw, filled with passionate presence and clear, expressive movement. When you watch Garage’s dancers, you’re witnessing embodied thought and feeling.

In many ways, Garage traces South Africa’s recent past and current circumstances. Its home is O’Kiep, a remote former mining area in the Namaqualand (Northern Cape) region of South Africa, not far from the border with Namibia. Its dancers are youthful co-creators in the Ensemble’s work, many of them hailing from backgrounds still too rarely featured on South African mainstream stages. Its founders are Alfred Hinkel and John Linden, two of S.A.’s most influential dance makers and company directors, perhaps best known for their decades-long work leading Cape Town’s Jazzart Dance Theatre to be one of the most important cultural and creative centers. From 1986-2010 they pioneered a teaching and performance ethos firmly rooted in the progressive ideological principles of the South African anti-apartheid struggle.

Links:

• https://www.garagedanceensemble.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/garageokiep
• https://www.instagram.com/garagedanceensemble/

General admission tickets are $30.00 and tickets for Virginia Tech student tickets with ID and youth ages 18 & under are $10.00 each.

To purchase tickets online, visit: https://tickets.artscenter.vt.edu/online/seatSelect.asp?createBO::WSmap=1&BOparam::WSmap::loadBestAvailable::performance_ids=83326846-9467-40B6-A9B4-BF4A3B9D1DBD.

Recommended for ages 14 and up. This performance contains adult language and mature themes.

The Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech is located at 330 Turner Street NW in Blacksburg, VA.

For more information, visit: https://artscenter.vt.edu/performances/garage-dance-ensemble.html or https://www.facebook.com/artscenteratvt or https://www.instagram.com/artscenteratvt/ or call 540-231-5300.