Asanda Ruda — chosen by dance, led by the spirit

“Dancing chose me,” says Asanda Ruda, 2025’s Standard Bank Young Artist for Dance. “It’s my way of life. I know nothing besides dance. I’ve done nothing except dance. When you find something that clicks with your body and your soul, you want to do it all the time.”

It was specifically African dance that “chose” Ruda, and she gave in to its allure as a young girl. Though she says it was to some extent a way for a daughter from a poor household in Soweto to keep herself occupied, she believes that ultimately it was her soul — “the spirit” — that led her in the right direction.

“I believe that it is a spiritual feeling that led me to African dance — that’s besides the fact that I had nothing to do, wanted to stave off boredom, and had too much time and, obviously, too much energy.”

Ruda is 32; for more than half a decade, she has been living and dancing in Europe, where she has performed, among others, in a touring production of the Pina Bausch Foundation’s revival of The Rite of Spring. She had, following her childhood experience of dancing in community halls as an after-school activity, racked up extensive training with Moving into Dance, a Johannesburg institution that provides a grounding in classical and African dance forms, while specialising in Afrofusion.

For Ruda, African dance is “dancing that requires the soul”. And it is to that impulse — of dance as a form of ritual and as a mechanism of healing — that she remains deeply, “ridiculously” connected.

For her, dance is a daily ritual that sustains her, keeps her safe and enables her to face life’s challenges.

Seeing Ruda dance is to recognise that, for her, moving to music is never merely a vocation or something she’s exceptionally skilled at. It is a way of transcending the limitations of physical reality, of connecting with something deeper, some “thing” beyond the rational.

And it is a way of working through “stuff” — emotional baggage, personal suffering, politics, pain, trauma and unease.

The work she has developed over the last couple of years, and which she performed in South Africa for the first time at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda, is titled KEMET — Black Lands. It’s a solo work of structured improvisation, meaning that, although there are touchpoints within the music, the exact ritual that emerges each time it’s performed is unique, a once-off.

During rehearsals, Ruda plays and experiments, investigates and explores, equipping herself emotionally and physically for the performance to come. Elements of what ultimately happens on stage rely on the impulses that arise on the day and in the moment.

What she always puts on display, however, is her soul.

Cultural emancipation

Ruda says the work is about “transgenerational identity” and cultural emancipation. It investigates, through movement, ways of disrupting “political sameness” to “be yourself”. Which makes the work sound cerebral, as if it requires intellectual interrogation, but what’s far more meaningful is simply to connect with it viscerally.

“It is like a confession,” she says. “Not a listing of past acts, but a recounting of feelings, of pain, of hurt and suffering. And, in moments, joy.”

It is also a reckoning with forces beyond rational explanation. It is, she says, “my story, my personal frustrations, my thoughts” in response to “people, politics, whatever it may be that weighs on me”.

It is guided by several pieces of music, starting with chanting that might be arising from the depths of the ocean or the comfort of the womb. And while the initial phases of the piece are deeply personal, by the end it will have evolved into an almost terrifying meditation on empathy.

The final piece of music in KEMET, says Ruda, was inspired by the war between Israel and Palestine. She wanted to explore through dance the suffering of others, to try to digest and express the inner landscape of people in a faraway place, people caught in a reality far beyond the comfort of her own existence.

She says that in these moments, she “borrows” and “travels outside of myself” to try to understand how it feels to be in a situation that is different from her own position of emancipated comfort.

She admits that KEMET is unnerving. “It is saying all the disturbing things that I want to say and that I need to tell you. It’s something very personal — my experience, the dreams that I have, the thoughts that I have with myself.”

Which is why, since returning to South Africa, she created a second dance work, a three-hander in which she dances alongside Sinazo Bokolo and Thandiwe Mqokeli, who are both extraordinary. Called Alkamal Walkamal Almutlaq (which means “completeness and absolute wholeness” in Arabic), it debuted in Makhanda in a double bill with KEMET, and to a great extent serves as its emotional counterweight. While no less accomplished, it feels less gut-wrenching, reaches into playfulness and embraces moments of lightness that enable the dancers to escape gravity.

As in KEMET, the piece takes you on a long journey, and its physical language seems vast. You might catch glimpses of yogic poses, martial arts movements, people playing and discovering, acts of worship, and you will recognise elements that have their origins in African dance traditions.

There are moments of danger, too: a sequence of flying arms, like missiles on the loose. It’s a brilliant counterpoint to the initial stillness and meditative calm of the work, a jolt to the senses. This symphony of fast-flailing limbs expresses all the myriad ways in which the arms can be used, but its effervescent energy makes you want to get on the stage and join in what is essentially a reverie of the body.

Mysteriousness

While Ruda is ebullient when tasked with discussing the significance of her work, there remains a modicum of mysteriousness, a sliver of cryptic unknowability that seems only right. After all, why should a dancer be asked to explain in words what she has already expressed in the more authentic language of movement and stillness? This is apparent while watching her dance — where words might fail, her body, with its physical language, speaks volumes.

“For me, dance is a safe space to vomit, to dump, to purge what is weighing you down, find actual freedom,” she says, alluding to art’s function as a tool to alleviate the soul of whatever afflicts it.

While she doesn’t claim that dancing or art can end the world’s troubles, she does believe that where art is permitted to flourish, there is less accumulated frustration and, as a consequence, less need for aggression, be it war or gender-based violence. In this sense, she sees art as capable of helping society heal.

“This is why art is so important,” she says. “This is why it is so important for children to be trained in the arts: so that we learn to talk about, digest and express what’s inside of us — so that we are less frustrated as a society, as a nation, as a collective. We need the space to work through what’s inside, a space to heal and to complete ourselves.”

Ruda says it’s heartbreaking that the arts get such a rotten deal in South Africa. She alludes to the defunding of dance companies, the dissolution of studios and the general lack of visibility of contemporary dance.

There is a sense, too, that she had to go all the way to Germany to join a European dance company to get the opportunities to dance, and to not only be supported but to be told that — as an artist — she has value.

“When you’re a South African artist, you’re essentially a suffering person,” she says. “You’re poor and you will suffer, and nobody will help you. The advice you get is to work hard and go out and seek your fortune. That’s why our artists are hard workers, but they’re poor.”

She stresses the value of investment in the arts by private sector institutions like Standard Bank, which she says is giving her opportunities she’s struggled to find elsewhere. It’s a struggle that explains why so many of our artists end up overseas, where their contributions are appreciated — and rewarded with a living wage.

“If you know somebody who would like to help me open my own studio, please do send them my contact details,” she says. “Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish…”

Until that dream is fulfilled, though, she is rehearsing at The Market Theatre ahead of a rare series of performances on home turf. DM

She will perform KEMET – Black Lands and Alkamal Walkamal Almutlaq on 6 and 7 September at Jomba!, an annual dance festival in Durban. Both works will also be staged in Joburg (on 12 and 13 September), during the satellite festival, Jomba! @ The Market, and again at The Market Theatre from 17 to 21 September.