Pantsula dance is a performing art born from the townships of Johannesburg. It is a dance form performed across South Africa, in a variety of contexts; in theatres, music videos and competitions in community halls, on national and international stages and on television, and in the streets of townships, cities and suburbs across South Africa and abroad. Its performance is widespread, but it has its beginnings as a dance form born in areas created to marginalise and oppress. There is a scarcity of academic scholarship related to pantsula dance. This thesis aims to be a contribution to that pre-existing body of knowledge in the hope that there can be further engagement on this important, and increasingly mainstream, art form. I have focused my thesis on analysing pantsula dance as a performance of 'the township'. This has been attempted through an ethnographic engagement with pantsula dancers based in different township areas of Johannesburg and Graha mstown: various members of Impilo Mapantsula, Via Katlehong, Intellectuals Pantsula, Via Kasi Movers, Dlala Majimboz and the cast of Via Katlehong's Via Sophiatown. The research was conducted between 2013 and 2016 and serves to represent various moments within the ethnographic research process, while coming to understand various aspects of pantsula dance. An engagement with notions of 'the township', the clothing choices of the pantsula 'uniform', the core moves, inherent hybridity in the form itself, and the dedication to the dance form as a representation of the isipantsula 'way of life', are addressed throughout the thesis. As well as engaging with the memory and representation of Sophiatown as an important component to pantsula dance. Pantsula dance, an intrinsically South African dance form, provides a celebratory conception of 'the township' space and allows people from different backgrounds to engage in an important part of South Africa's past, present and future.

Using a framework of feminism and poststructuralism, this thesis aims to interrogate the utilisation of the body as a contested site of struggle for meaning in contemporary theatre dance in South Africa. "Both feminism, as a politics, and dance, as a cultural practice, share a concern for the body" (Brown, 1983: 198). A feminist analysis of dance can offer a tool to interrogate the dominant discourses of gender and race that surround and permeate both the female and male body in contemporary theatre dance. The body is not a neutral site onto which cultural codes and conventions are inscribed, as the dancer's body is always marked in the physical sense of gender and race. This thesis aims to decode the body and examine how the discourses of gender and race are embodied by the moving body on stage - specifically in the South African (KwaZulu-Natal) context. By a feminist appropriation of the poststructural endeavour, this research will look at how the body, as discourse, can be interrogated to examine how the interconnected discourses of gender and race surround and permeate the moving body. The utilisation of a poststructural paradigm will aid in the examination of how the dominant discourses of gender and race are hegemonically imposed onto the body. Poststructuralism also offers an understanding that there exist counter-discourses that have the ability to resist the dominant discourses of gender and race. This notion becomes important to the study of contemporary theatre dance as an art form. This thesis will examine how South African (Durban-based) contemporary theatre dance choreographers explore the body's potential to be subversive in performance. The thesis will focus on the body's ability to interrogate the discourses that operate in its surroundings and permeate its lived reality. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2000.