The body speaks

Melding protest, lyricism and ancestral tradition, Asanda Ruda's Kemet is a visceral journey of emancipation, healing and artistic defiance

- Keith Bain

For the duration of her performance, it was impossible to look away. Asanda Ruda, this year's Standard Bank Young Artist for Dance, was performing not only as though her life depended on it, but seemed to be channelling some numinous force. In the theatre with us, there was something mystical, spiritual, divine.

Also on display? Her soul. Potent and alive.

It's been said Ruda's choreography “takes us to the crossroads of myth and motion”; she dances as the intersection of protest and lyricism, the poetry of her physical movements a match for the depth of her message.

She was, as she danced, expressing the unsayable, her repertoire of gestures and movements clues to her ability to communicate from a place beyond reason, her body calling out to the universe in plaintive cries, her performance a purging of the spirit.

It was thrilling, monumental, intimate and disquieting and it moved me in ways that are difficult to describe without lapsing further into hyperbole or becoming wholly esoteric.

The piece, a solo work that earlier this year earned Ruda a choreographer's research residency award from the Centre National de la Danse and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, is called Kemet (Black Lands). It's an exhausting piece of structured improvisation that's constantly in progress, shaped by Ruda's ongoing personal reflection. It's also an outward expression of a journey of self-emancipation.

It is “a protest of the self”, says Ruda, a movement towards “new states of being”. And while it is grounded in inherited dance traditions, it is also a ritual of escape from any “predefined framework of cultural inheritance”.

It is a dance of liberation and healing, a reckoning with the limitations of time, space and “transgenerational identity”, although any such cerebral or philosophical concerns tend not to intrude on the pleasure to be had from watching her dance. Witnessing