Bootlegged

The performance Bootlegged has been cancelled due to flight restrictions from South Africa.

Holland Festival will contact ticket buyers as soon as possible for a refund of purchased tickets.

Encounters in words and dance

‘It’s only a game, you know…’ These words initiate the start of the dance piece Bootlegged by Boyzie Cekwana and Danya Hammoud. ‘It’s nothing but a game…’ However, this is like no game that the western gaze is accustomed to. If naming the world in words other than those of the colonial pen is a game, then this is not. In their own words, they ‘attempt to create and write a collective story at a time when all that which is common and shared is bending under the load of bigoted contest and distorted versions of histories.’

Artists are ‘smugglers’ of ideas and stories. Bootlegging refers to the illicit trade in banned substances, a practice by Americans during the prohibition period of the 1920s. It also speaks to the calculated practice of white colonists in the United States to dominate the indigenous population, which they hooked on alcohol to break down resistance to violent dispossession and forestall fair negotiations. Bootlegged is about the resilience of the human body. The dancers meet in the centre of a circle, searching, turning and bending: ‘We come together so we can bend at the waist, reach down to the top of our boots and take out our bootlegged goods, our smuggled stories’.