Garage Dance Ensemble’s Krummelpap, Scandals Wrapped in Prayer

“Our Families hide their scandals in prayer. And they who are teeming with secrets close their eyes…”

- Ronelda Kamfer from her text for Krummelpap, Scandals Wrapped In Prayer

Krummelpap, Scandals Wrapped in Prayer (Krummelpap, Afval en Sunlightseepbaddens) is a dance-theater piece created and performed by Garage Dance Ensemble, which makes its home in a former mining area in the Namaqualand region of South Africa, not far from the border with Namibia. Set in a specific place and time about a particular brown community geographically far from our own lands, Krummelpap is a devised work of raw emotion and dark humor. It unfolds universal stories of young people reckoning with the past and confronting conditions of the present to self-define and celebrate who they are and who they would like to be.

An uncompromising text by award-winning South African poet Ronelda Kamfer is the soundtrack of the work. The movement spins out of these verses to capture the personal and political circumstances and aspirations of the coloured peoples of South Africa’s Northern and Western Cape—descendants of slaves, Dutch slave owners, and the indigenous Khoe-San.

This full-length dance-theater production debuted at Woordfees 2020 in Stellenbosch, South Africa, and toured to the 2021 Afrovibes Festival in Holland. As described by Afrovibes: 

“Krummelpap is a dance performance that tears off the plasters from the wounds of the coloured peoples of the Western and Northern Cape in South Africa. The dancers conjure up a reality that moves across your skin like sandpaper. With a compelling virtuoso style, they dance with their text and their language, making the social content of their story accessible and tangible. This dance performance makes you cry, laugh, feel uncomfortable but it also sends messages of hope.”

For the production’s United States debut tour with Center Stage, the original text, written in a dialect of Afrikaans, will be translated by the author and presented in English.

Close out Revolutionary Spaces’ Raising Voices weekend with this live performance of Garage Dance Ensemble’s Krummelpap, Scandals Wrapped in Prayer at Old South Meeting House. Doors will open at 6:30 PM and the performance will begin at 7:00 PM (Runtime: 1 hour). Drinks and snacks will be available for purchase.

Premium tickets include a guaranteed seat in the first or second row of the center pews. Standard tickets are available anywhere else on the main floor. All seating is general admission and available on a first-come, first-served basis.

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