Today’s featured artist for the UJ Arts & Culture’s ‘The Pandemic’ project, is South African multi-award-winning dancer, choreographer and co-founder of Broken Borders Art Project, Fana Tshabalala.
The work is inspired by the UJ Choir’s rendition of Sedjedo by Angélique Kidjo arranged by Sabelo Mthembu and featured on When the Earth Stands Still.
“My piece ‘Confined by Numbers’ is the exploration of the unstable mental state. The constant changes in its surrounding affect its ability to be independent. The only way to survive, is to re-imagine and re-create the context of every moment and experience”, says Fana Tshabalala.
About Fana Tshabalala
Fana Tshabalala is the 2013 Standard Bank Young Artist Award recipient for Dance. The 2014 Visas for Creation recipient and the 2018 Black Excellence Award winner in Chicago Illinois. Tshabalala is also the former associate artistic director for the Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative.
Tshabalala has been choreographing and performing his work locally and internationally, one of his works titled “Between” was part of Dance Dialogue Africa. “Between” toured Germany and later toured Africa reaching 12 countries and 14 cities. He was also part of the choreographic workshop that took place in South Africa where he worked with dancers from Ballet Geneva and other South African choreographers.
In early 2015, he worked with Nanziwe Mzuzu a writer from Cape Town on a TV documentary commissioned by ETV, which was inspired by his latest solo titled “Man”. He has also worked with children from the Kliptown Youth Programme on two dance movies that became a runner up for a short film competition in Paris.
More recently, he was awarded a Mellon artistic residency where he choreographed a full-length work for Flat Foot Dance Company and worked on his solo titled “Zann”. Fana Tshabalala is currently the co-founder and artistic director for Broken borders Art Project.
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