CHRIS THURMAN

We are attuned to images of destruction. Perhaps we are becoming immune to them. Gaza, Mariupol and Khartoum lie in ruins. Large stretches of Iran and Lebanon are being razed by US-Israeli bombs. Millions of people live amid the rubble of war, and millions more have been forced to flee their homes and countries.

What is to be done in the face of this relentless desire to obliterate — to dismember human bodies and demolish their places of habitation? Gregory Maqoma has an answer: we must build. And, where necessary, rebuild. And if this fails … build again.

Since his retirement as a dancer at end-2024, Maqoma has expanded his creative vision as a choreographer and director. He describes it as a process of “stepping away from being the primary vessel”, the dancing body, and “stepping more fully into authorship, mentorship and composition”. It is “a transition from centre stage” to exploring “the architecture of the stage”.

Indeed, architecture and construction become sustained conceits in his latest work, Genesis: The Beginning and End of Time, which opens at Joburg Theatre next week. They also provide useful metaphors in appreciating how Maqoma and his collaborators have built this “dance opera” out of disparate materials.

The elements of movement, voice, music, lighting and design are compounded into a unitary and beautiful whole. Genesis can be enjoyed purely at the level of aesthetic and spectacle, a series of micro-dramas in which accomplished performers conjure vivid scenes thick with the shifting atmospheres of antagonism, resolution, fear, joy, anger, hope and celebration.

But these are not isolated moods and moments. They form part of a narrative that is both historical — broadly tracing a trajectory from the precolonial to the postcolonial — and, by contrast, mythical and poetic. The show’s subtitle thus points not to some apocalyptic “end time” but rather to a mode of being that is “out of time” or beyond the temporal.

Genesis is nevertheless stridently political and it is expressed through another of its building blocks: text. Karthika Nair’s libretto draws on the voices of Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon, as well as sacred texts and Xhosa rhetorical tradition, to present an individual and collective journey through suffering to something like redemption.

The central figure here, played by Anelisa Phewa, is imagined variously as a heroic leader and an “everyman”. Soon after his appearance onstage, he is set upon by the ensemble of dancers — an act interpreted by some as a form of ukuthwala or abduction, and by others as the killing of Biko himself. I saw in this violence a recreation of the archetypal fate of the poet-musician Orpheus, who was torn limb from limb for favouring Apollo over Dionysus.

Both gods are honoured in this production, which offers much for the senses but also locates itself at a rich intellectual nexus. It all starts, however, in the body of the dancer. The libretto draws our attention to the “architecture” of a dancer’s foot: sole, arch, heel, muscle, bone. The bodies of Maqoma’s dancers are later transformed into building components, making the foundation, arch and spire of a new construction representing a utopian society. Unsurprisingly, despite repeated attempts, this idealism falters and falls. It may also call to mind a different kind of aspiration, empire-building, or a doomed Tower of Babel.

Of course, it was ostensibly as punishment for the hubris of Babel that humans were divided into different language groups and dispersed. Maqoma’s multilingual Genesis offers an alternative interpretation of the human condition, suggesting that we are not condemned to division and alienation. An especially urgent strand in this show is the rejection of xenophobia and its obsession with the “foreign”. If we are all (in one way or another) exiles and immigrants, building culture and community is an organic, unending process.

Maqoma recognises the perpetual “half-life” of colonialism, a history of oppression whose shadow will never fully disappear. Yet, with the world’s attention on missiles raining down to smite and destroy, justified through a divisive perversion of biblical discourse, Genesis — South African, pan-African — invokes a universal desire for restoration, justice and peace.