Gregory Maqoma’s ‘Genesis’ is not an ending

The last time I spoke to Gregory Maqoma, he was retiring. Or at least that was the language we reached for then, retirement, an ending, the quiet folding away of a body that had carried the emotional and political weight of South African contemporary dance for over two decades. He was stepping off the stage, he said, hanging up his dancing boots, loosening his grip on the centre of the frame.

It felt final, like the closing chapter of a long incandescent book. And yet here we are speaking again, not about an ending but aboutGenesis. “I never said I was stopping work,” Maqoma corrects gently, when I bring this up.

“The break is me not being on stage.” That distinction sits at the core ofGenesis, Maqoma’s latest work and his return to the Baxter Theatre for its world premiere from 18 to 21 February 2026. Framed as a groundbreaking dance opera fusing dance, music and poetry,Genesisis not a comeback to the stage but a reconfiguration of power, labour and vision. Maqoma is no longer the body through which the work speaks.

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He is the architect. Renowned choreographer Maqoma is the founder and creative director of Vuyani Dance Theatre, established in 1999. “For the last 25 years, I have been on stage,” he says.

“I now step out of that so I can really be involved in the choreography and the making of work and not the literal form.” What emerges from that stepping back is a work of formidable ambition.Genesis, subtitledThe Beginning and End of Timeis a poetic and visceral meditation on creation, collapse and the possibility of beginning again. It follows Maqoma’s critically acclaimedExit/Exist(2023) andCion: Requiem of Ravel’s Bolero(2024), both of which enjoyed triumphant seasons at the Baxter and together form a loose philosophical continuum. But where those works were anchored by Maqoma’s own body as protagonist,Genesisdisperses authorship across an ensemble, a score, a libretto, a stage picture that feels at once expansive and intimate.

At its conceptual centre is a desire to return, not nostalgically but radically. “Genesisis a desire to return to the beginning of time,” Maqoma explains, “but also to allow ourselves to immerse in the revolutionary ideas of those people who have spoken quite extensively about Black consciousness and how we need to tune into our humanity — the sense of consciousness of who we are and culture being the datum that should lead in on spirit.” This is not abstract theorising. Maqoma situatesGenesisfirmly within the present moment, shaped by contemporary leadership, global instability and the repeated failure of systems that continue to produce inequality and violence.

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