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The young boy couldn’t resist the dance moves he saw being performed around him: the rapid foot taps, the ligament-spraining knee twists, the torso shimmies, all coming together in what some might describe as a sort of urban tap dance.
Growing up in an impoverished Black township near Johannesburg in the 1980s, the boy, Vusi Mdoyi, loved watching his father dance with friends, in a style known as pantsula, in the dirt yards of their staid four-room bungalows.
It was a sprinkle of joy in the dark days of apartheid.
At about 7 years old, Mr. Mdoyi began mimicking the dance form. By 10, he was dancing in school festivals. By 14, he had created his own dance crew with neighborhood friends.
Now 44, Mr. Mdoyi is a celebrated dancer and choreographer who has helped to achieve what felt unimaginable during apartheid: turning the street art of pantsula into a high art that attracts global praise, and audiences.
“To produce incredible work that is touring all over the world now — that, for me, it’s the work of a visionary,” said Gregory Maqoma, an acclaimed South African dancer and choreographer who has mentored Mr. Mdoyi.
In 1998, while still a teenager, Mr. Mdoyi took part in workshops and shows put on by a dance company, Step Afrika!, which was co-founded in South Africa by C. Brian Williams, a Howard University graduate who had worked in the region. The company fused African American step dancing with traditional African dance.
The interest that the American dancers showed in pantsula and other African dances helped to inject a sense of pride that their dances were meaningful, Mr. Mdoyi said. Under the white-led apartheid government, which had lost power only four years earlier, Africans were often made to feel ashamed of their own culture, he said.
He admired how Black Americans were able to take culture that came from the streets and professionalize it, and he said the experience helped him to see what was possible for newly liberated Black South Africans.
In part with connections made through Step Afrika!, Mr. Mdoyi made his first overseas trip, to teach a pantsula workshop in Britain in 2001. The next year, he toured internationally with Via Katlehong, a pantsula dance company named after his native township.
“Pantsula culture, it was more related to criminals,” Mr. Mdoyi said. Now, he added, it’s a form of cultural and social activism “through telling our own stories.”
Mr. Mdoyi’s latest work is in some ways a full circle moment to what originally vaulted his career from South African festivals to stages across the world: He choreographed and danced in a piece performed in Soweto this month, during the 30th anniversary celebration of Step Afrika!
His new piece, titled, “The Tattered Soul of a Worker,” tells the story of South African migrant workers who were forced to travel from their homes to find jobs, and it offers a critique of a capitalist system that has left the working class struggling.
The dancers, clad in midcentury formal suits, dance at times with beer crates — it’s common in South Africa to see young people dancing pantsula with beer crates at traffic lights, seeking tips.
It’s an example of how Mr. Mdoyi uses his choreography “to provoke and question and also make statements,” he said.
Black South Africans began to take up tap dancing in the 1960s after seeing it in American films, Mr. Maqoma said. That eventually evolved into pantsula, which started in townships where Black South Africans were forced to live.
The apartheid regime largely restricted Black South Africans from freely traveling into cities. That left them with virtually no access to the theaters and studios where dance thrived as an art form. So for many Black South Africans, there was little expectation that dance could be anything more than a social activity, with performances done as entertainments at weddings or community gatherings.
“It was a way of escaping all the oppression and challenges,” said Aliko Dlamini, a family friend who used to dance and socialize with Mr. Mdoyi’s father in the township. “It was fun.”
As apartheid restrictions began to loosen in the late 1980s and early 1990s, opportunities increased for Black South Africans to access formal dance training and turn their talents into art.
For Mr. Mdoyi, his focus on dancing as he grew up kept him away from the violence that consumed many Black communities while the government tried to maintain its fragile grip on power in the dying days of apartheid.
Mr. Mdoyi said he connected with a popular street entertainer who danced pantsula and introduced him to the dance scene in nightclubs around Johannesburg. The clubs would give alcohol as the prize in competitions, but because he was too young to drink, Mr. Mdoyi said, he would sell the liquor he won.
The nightclubs were something of a dance academy for Mr. Mdoyi. He met street dancers from many different neighborhoods, each bringing their own styles, techniques and approaches.
“I embodied all of that, and it made me to be a very unique dancer,” Mr. Mdoyi said.
Mr. Mdoyi’s dance productions can come across as stage plays, with elaborate costuming, soundtracks and even dialogues that tell a story beyond the dance moves themselves. He plays with genres and moods.
In a performance called “Footnotes,” Mr. Mdoyi and other dancers lay a soundtrack with typewriters, typing eviction notices. The piece grows angry and frantic as disgusted shouts from tenants boom over loudspeakers.
In another piece, “Via Sophiatown,” Mr. Mdoyi tells the story of the 1950s-era Johannesburg neighborhoods that were a breeding ground for Black arts and culture. He mixes pantsula with other forms of dancing, like jazz, in performances that radiate an air of joy.
“When I look at Vusi’s work, I don’t look at only what the body does but the content inside that,” said Sello Pesa, a South African dancer and choreographer. “He’s got something to say. The pantsula or the movement as a language, it’s not enough. He feeds or injects ideas inside it.”
Mr. Mdoyi knew he wanted to become a professional dancer in high school, he said, when his dancing won him praise from classmates and he started being invited to dance at weddings, school events and community festivals. Even the local bullies took him under their wings and gave him protection, he said, because they associated pantsula with the rugged street life that they related to.
In 1998, Mr. Mdoyi won an award at a national dance festival for the first time, and the festival director connected him with Jackie Semela, who had established the Soweto Dance Theater, a company based in the nation’s largest township. Mr. Semela helped to start Step Afrika!, which in 1994 held its first festival, in Soweto, only months after South Africans elected Nelson Mandela president in the country’s first democratic election.
Under Mr. Semela’s tutelage, Mr. Mdoyi not only honed his craft as a dancer and found a springboard to perform and choreograph pieces internationally, but he also learned the business side of the profession.
He now has two companies dedicated to creating pantsula shows and teaching the dance. Like many other artists, though, Mr. Mdoyi struggles to make ends meet with his creative work alone, so he also rents out several homes that he built in his native township.
The income from dance and real estate has allowed Mr. Mdoyi to build a spacious, two-level home in Katlehong, with shiny silver columns in the front, Italian tiles on the roof and a studio for his dance academy.
He owns other plots of land in the township, where he hopes to someday build a larger studio. But it was an intentional decision to develop his dance academy in his home community, he said, rather than opening it in one of the commercial or artsy hubs in Johannesburg.
“It’s always better when you see something that is right accessible to you,” Mr. Mdoyi said. “We were very far when we grew up — and even still now — far from these professional studios. They were not catered for us.”
It was important in the township, he added, “for our youth to access professional spaces where they feel very welcome, and they’ve got professional studios, they are in a facility that encourages them.”
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