Garage Dance Ensemble

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Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech

Co-sponsored by the Black Cultural Center

Garage Dance Ensemble brings this deeply personal and socially charged contemporary dance-theatre work named for krummelpap, a South African comfort food similar to American grits. Featuring an uncompromising text by award-winning poet Ronelda Kamfer, the movement captures the personal and political circumstances and aspirations of the people of South Africa’s former mining community, Namaqualand. 

Laser-focused on its community, Garage Dance Ensemble has rarely left its home turf. Now the five-dancer ensemble is coming to the U.S. for the first time, bringing one of its recent pieces. A work that combines stark poetry and powerful movement, Krummelpap, Scandals Wrapped in Prayer (originally Krummelpap, Afval en Sunlightseepbaddens) showcases the company’s unique approach to tell the stories of young people reckoning with the stigmas, violence, and rage of a damaged and disenfranchised community.

Scandals is the ensemble’s most recent work created through a process of collective choreography. At its heart lies a long, searing, and wide-ranging poem by South African literary star Kamfer, commissioned by Garage Dance Ensemble. Both words and movement vocabulary speak the local language, without flourishes and theatrical trappings.

For the production’s U.S. debut tour, the original text, written in a dialect of Afrikaans, will be translated by the author and presented in English.