from Monaco to Soweto...

3rd April 2006. First day in Soweto, the enormous townships outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, where we will be working the coming days with the dancers of PARTS-trained choreographer George Khumalo. It was a long journey. Our point of departure was not our home base, Brussels, but it was Monaco, the refuge of some of the richest people in the world. Ictus gave several concerts there on 1st April in the festival Printemps des Arts in Monaco. To then travel from a place such as Monaco to a place like Soweto is like doing space travel from one distinct planet to a completely different and seperated other planet. This is at least how things look on the surface: In fact, what one finds in all these different worlds are people who in essence are not at all so different, even though they clearly live in extremely different surroundings with unjust different opportunities. It is an incredible privilege to be able to travel and work within such separated worlds, as we can thanks to these projects we develop in such distinct places in Europe, the Middle East, and now also in South Africa and Mozambique. It is wonderful to see George Khumalo work with his dancers in Soweto and to understand that such meticulous search for estetically right or wished for body positions or movements or expressions is what others like them are doing at this very moment in worlds planets away from this one here in Soweto, as if nothing else matters or mattered. percussionist Miquel Bernat joins a warm-up exercise with dancer Bonolo Ratsidi