Vuka Kleva was incubated and first performed in 2019 as part of Season 6 of The Centre for the Less Good idea. In December 2022, it returned to The Centre in the form of a For Once performance and continued its development towards a premiere in the Netherlands in 2023 with a partnership between VAP Dancer Academy, SA; and Untold Empowerment, Netherlands.

Vuka Kleva, uses isiPantsula to trace the everyday rhythms of systems of labour, capital, and human energy.

Dancer, choreographer, teacher and Pantsula practitioner Vusi Mdoyi and his ensemble of dancers use performance as a means of speaking to night shifts, nine-to-fives, commutes in and out of the city, the frenetic energy of the assembly line, the grinding nature of a city gridlocked by labour and bodies caught up in ritualistic toil.

Percussion and rhythm are generated off-stage and by the human body in equal measure, and become enduring languages of performance and instruction. In between it all, embodied notions of the human legacy of forced labour emerge, intersecting with the contemporary realities of labour along the lines of race, class and gender.

Vuka Kleva is a performance that speaks to the nature, syncopation, and complicated human mechanics of embodied labour. Work, posits Vuka Kleva, is ever-present in our lives, be it on the morning commute, in the office, on the streets, at home, or in our sites of leisure.

— David Mann

CONCEPTUALISER & DIRECTOR | Vusi Mdoyi
DRAMATURGE | Phala Ookeditse Phala
PERFORMERS | Elma Shilda Motloenya, Lungile Ngwenya, Bukhosibakhe Pantsulatographer Khoza, Vuyani Feni, Thobeka Lynnecoline Ndodana, Paballo Peter Phiri & Pule Ncaba
PERCUSSIONISTS | Michael Micca Manganye & Vuyani Feni
CREATIVE CONTRIBUTOR | Vusi Arts Projects (VAP)