The fifth episode of this tradition curated by Thalia Laric and Manuela Tessi took place over November-December 2022 in Cape Town. Yet again, the confluence of dancers and musicians creating works in real-time — or in previous terms, improvised — brought about a celebrated abundance of creativity with expanded possibilities and growth.

The technical input was offered as Contact Improvisation (Thalia) and Movement Improvisation Research (Manuela) over two months in various studios and settings in Cape Town. Apart from those who ultimately participated in performance these sessions and workshops offered ample learning opportunities for newcomers and visitors into the realm of this artistic community.

As with each of the previous years, specific developmental occurrences took place as autobiographical feedback and information about who I have unfolded into, and as, as a result of our work together, on the floor and on stage. Embedded in this reflected awareness, was also an ever more acute observation of my teachers, how they have developed over the year since we have last met, and how this impacted on the quality of our work together. In addition, I was curious as to how the work on the floor would manifest for me in performance.

Technically, interesting phenomena befell me. We were taught from an extremely learnsome — and learnable — approach that imbibed us in the technique of "softness", a paradigm of movement that could be coined "democratic", "listening worthy", "approachable", "safe", it was also highly creative, daring, confrontational, and bold in potential. Self-awareness exuded the choices we would make, as informed from a space of listening-sensing-choosing-entering-exiting with a high incidence of performativity, giving form to one's engagement with others on the floor. This quality was enhanced since the 2021 episode of Music-Dance.

The dancers around me becomes younger and younger each year. What does that tell you?
The developmental reality of being at least twice if not thrice as old as anybody else on the floor has a multitude of significant realisations for me. As much as I feel comfortable with the technique, I noticed that I have pockets, some blind spots I am sure, of idiosyncratic interpretations of instructions. These are happenstance momentary group engagements, or movements by myself that I wish to take a different sovereignty on. I guess I would need space to explore what this actually implies in my own development, and this may take its own time. The best I have on feedback devices have been through photographer Lindsey Apollis and random videos taken by dancers while they witnessed the work on the floor. The random of this recording also acts as a report on how I slotted in in a group of dancers and musicians for whom the recording of the work has become a momentary instinct with an equally random possibility of it being a learning device: how much will I be able to reflect on my, and others' work in the aftermath of the highly charged and densely intimate processes on the floor.

This desire — to learn more and more of myself while in interaction with other dancers and musicians — is one that I wish to cultivate more and more of in the Music-Dance tradition as well as in my own teaching and performing opportunities. Who am I becoming through my work as a dancer, now that I am in my 68th year? How does my dance fall (like a pack of cards handed out) in the space of creation? How do I manage an increasing presence of spirituality, liminality, the sacred, the ineffable? How much of these are formed in none other than the anarchic, erotic, dark spaces of the moments between two dancers. And some of those being the being I am, the nothingness I am, there on the floor?

Once in performance something more than the body, rhythm, touch, lift, hold, look, carry, step or fall happens. In my case, I was allotted one dancer at a time to be in a duo with, with two or three musicians, all of us accompanying the creation as a kind of download of what wants to happen, what is already present. The listening here is for everything present: the other dancer, the music, the movements of the musicians, the instruments, the audience members, the real-time creation of lighting as the work progresses, the spaces where nothing is happening, the waiting for the download and the will to embody that phenomenon with a responsive, and responsible authenticity.

This is the obvious elements of our task. But then, there is increasingly more. The thinness of the veil — between the obvious and the other element that inspires the work on the floor — is ever conjuring of my own psychic contents, imagery, passing interiority and fleeting sensations that I sense in my bodymind. Often a physical connection with a dancer could be evocative of an interiority that I cannot ignore, have to sustain and follow the message of. All this while I realise that I am also in the presence of another dancer, with possibly, an equally and intimately dense interiority playing out in our interaction. What a complex entanglement of creationality!

What have I learned from my experience in Music-Dance 2022? That unequivocally, one becomes a force of nature in old age. I can truly say the only purpose in life is to become old. What else, when I am in my/our/the dance, and it could be my last? How do I dance that dance? What do I hold back, and what exactly is at stake? What do I surrender to and have no attachments to, die off, be willing to be slayed and pulverised by youthful exuberance and vibrant lifeforce? What am I for? in each moment.

The gratitude I dance — moment by moment, to be alive, in complex interactions with artists feeling and sensing their choices around me — is a substance of the edge, the last, the end. Therefore, far more than precious, it is profundity in action, shifting consciousness, shaping futures and souls.

The two dancers I have been chosen to dance with was Siphenati Mayekiso and Andy Colombo. Both in their unique and respectable ways entered the spaces of rapture bravely and masterfully. Masterfully, purely because they allowed — in their vitality — for my own interior spaces to become known to me while they sustained their integrity and immanence — being in something more-than, larger than.

Photos by Lindsey Appolis