The 27th annual JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience, hosted by UKZN’s Centre for Creative Arts, has announced that it will honour South African dance-maker and teacher Sbonakaliso (or Sbo as she likes to be called) Ndaba as the 2025 JOMBA! Legacy Artist.
Born and raised in Durban, KZN, Sbonakaliso Ndaba received her primary dance training at Jazzart Dance Theatre in Cape Town under the direction of Alfred Hinkel. Over the course of her long and illustrious career, she has had the privilege of dancing and choreographing for a great many South African companies including Jazzart Dance Theatre, Moving into Dance, Vuyani Dance Theatre and Tshwane Dance Theatre in Johannesburg, Phenduka Dance Theatre, FLATFOOT Dance Company and Fantastic Flying Fish Dance Company in Durban. International companies she has worked with include Southern Edge Art and Barking Gecko in Australia, Lina's Dance Production in Denmark, and Introdans in the Netherlands.
Also deeply significant to the JOMBA! Legacy award is her lifelong commitment to initiating many performance training initiatives including Phenduka Dance Theatre, Indoni Dance Arts Academy and recently SboNdaba Dance, a non-profit company dedicated to strengthening the performing arts in Cape Town. JOMBA!’s artistic director Dr Lliane Loots says, “Sbo’s long term impact on training professional contemporary dancers and the legacy of this is felt throughout South Africa and we are deeply humbled that we get to honour her and her work in this way”.
Recognised as one of South Africa’s leading African Contemporary choreographers, Ndaba has won a number of awards, including Best Choreographer from Daimler Chrysler SA 2002/3, and the Western Cape Cultural Affairs Award for Best Contribution to Performance: Dance 2016
Her dance company, SboNdaba Dance (which formed in 2021) focusses on not just delivering excellence in performance but on creating employment by building professional capacity and platforms for the under-developed performing arts industry in Cape Town, and, more specifically, creating opportunities for the under-resourced performing artists of the Western Cape townships.
Loots says, “The JOMBA! festival’s 2025 overall curatorial theme and provocation is “Moving Border/Lands” and we can think of no other South African artist who has exemplified this moving across physical, economic and access borders in her dance work, whether this has been training and teaching, or choreography. We are also delegated to honour Sbo back in her home city!”
Sbo and SboNdaba Dance will offer a rich programme of new works on the opening two nights of the festival, and will then travel onto JOMBA! @ the Market Theatre in Johannesburg.
JOMBA! takes place at The Sneddon Theatre in Durban from 26 August to 7 September, and the satellite festival takes place at The Market Theatre in Johannesburg from 10 to 13 September 2054.
For more information go to www.jomba.ac.za.
Photo credit: Val Adamson