11 – 19 Oct 2025
11 – 19 Oct 2025
Production: GAT
By: Gillian Mitchell
Photo: Faroll Coetzee and provided
Garage Dance Ensemble returns to the Woordfees with GAT, a visually sublime work directed and choreographed by Bryon Klaasen. This production, billed as dance in the programme, is so much more: It is a theatrical experience that weaves together movement, music, and text to evoke the soul of a community.
Beneath a clear, star-strewn sky, under the wide, sheltering branches of an ancient tree, the actors and dancers traverse a sand-strewn patch of earth. In every movement and with every breath, they conjure up the dry aridity of the Northern Cape – its textures, its tones, its unrelentingly pervasive dust. Memory, loss, and belonging thread through the bodies and voices of the performers and, like the waterfalls of dust constantly slipping through their fingers, their stories disappear yet always leave behind motes of memory.
Klaasens’ choreographic style is modern and always freshly experimental as he tests dancers’ physicality. The most extraordinary images are conjured up with a wheelbarrow and on the back of a bakkie. And the fancy footwork of the Riel, with its unique silhouette, reminds us that history and legacy are etched not only in memory, but also in the dust kicked up by dancing feet.
GAT is grounded in the lived realities of a marginalized, impoverished community in the Northern Cape and the stage becomes a living archive in performance – a space where voices that are often overlooked can be heard, remembered, and honoured. Despite being the story of a particular community there is a powerful universality in GAT that reminds us that no matter who we are, or what we become, both our beginning and our end are written in dust – we are dust, and to dust we shall return.
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12 Oct 19:00
50 min | Libertas-plaas
R180 | R210 at the gate
