Gregory Maqoma’s GENESIS: The Beginning and End of Time is a powerful and allegorical journey through the half-life of colonial history, the timeless quest for liberation, and the inner and outer battles human beings face on the way. Inspired by the revolutionary ideas of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, and the poetic defiance of migrant communities across the world, Maqoma and team confront the ghouls of colonial legacies and their role in perpetuating contemporary injustices. GENESIS adopts a hybrid form, the dance opera – where movement, music, and text weave seamlessly into an intensely theatrical and poetic narrative –and sets the story in a parallel time, one suffused with biblical imagery, regional myths, and recent history.

Set to live music and song and spoken-word, the work pulses with rhythms rooted in South African traditions while reflecting global wounds: slavery, colonial occupation, state-sanctioned massacres, displacement and silence. GENESIS asks how history repeats itself, how the long shadows of the past shape our present and our future, and how memory is vital to empowering resistance.

Through this high-octane, multidisciplinary, performance, Maqoma transforms the stage into a site of mourning, awakening, defiance, and hope. The body becomes an archive, a protest, a prayer — dancing between ruin and renewal. This is not just a show: it is a reclamation of voice, of occupied space, of stolen time.