VUSI MDOYI is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher. He is the founding director of VAP Dance Academy, Theater, and Studios in Katlehong as well as co-founder of Impilo Mapantsula Global Movement, an organization that preserves, promotes, researches, documents, and further develops Pantsula culture. Pantsula is an energetic dance form that emerged in the Black townships of South Africa during the apartheid era. Mdoyi has been closely connected to the history, politics, fashion, music, and language of this cultural movement since childhood and has been working for more than twenty years to introduce the art form across regions—on theater stages, in experimental art spaces, and in academia. With Impilo Mapantsula, Mdoyi has realized a series of international stage productions—including “The Ecstatic” (2019) and “How a Falling Star Lit Up the Purple Sky” (2022) in collaboration with Jeremy Nedd.

PHALA OOKEDITSE PHALA is a playwright, theater artist, dramaturg, and director. His work has won awards in South Africa, the United States, the Czech Republic, Australia, and Scotland. Born in Botswana, he studied performing arts at Wits University in Johannesburg. From 2019 to 2023, he was Animator of the Centre for the Less Good Idea, an interdisciplinary arts incubator in Maboneng, Johannesburg. He is co-director of the arts collective Noma Yini, which focuses on “storying”— the multiple ways of coming into, portraying, forming, building, making, and performing stories. His works champion emotional and psychologically-stimulating story as a uniquely African aesthetic. His focus is on methodologies of creating work in ways that collapse and disrupt conventional norms.