Joanna Holewa Chrona’s first solo work, “Phakathi Inside,” is a solo odyssey, a return to the inner body and the force dwelling within. It explores the physical and spiritual dimensions, strengthening the manifestation of an inner avatar—an embodiment of a powerful spirit in physical form. Through a unique approach to self and movement, Joanna Holewa Chrona investigates the purpose of dance as a vessel to navigate life’s peaks and valleys. What unfolds when one discovers that the magic resides within ourselves, and that the true superpower lies in the art of transmutation?

As Joanna’s avatar embarks on her journey, the room metamorphoses, enveloped in light and sound that accentuate her essence and presence. Slow and intricate movements intertwine with bursts of restrained volcanic energy, embodying the life that animates the physical form.

With the music in this work, Joanna is carrying on her lengthy engagement and exchange with South African artists and culture, which started in 2015. This piece has South African-inspired electronic music with lyrics in isiXhosa sung by Ntsika Fana Ngxanga. The name  “Phakathi Inside” is a South African slang mixing isiZulu with English meaning “Inside Inside”.

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Joanna Holewa Chrona is a Swedish dancer, choreographer, project leader and Dj located in Sweden and South Africa. Her dance practice is based on several movement traditions: popping from the United States, isiPantsula from from South Africa, Sabar from Senegal and Afro-Cuban. During the last twelve years Joanna has participated as a dancer in many productions nationally and internationally. Since 2020, the focus has been on her own produced stage performances and festivals, exchanges and workshops.

Joanna’s aspirations and inspiration stem from the freedom, honesty, and purity of improvisation as well as from the transformative and healing power of dance, music, nature, and human connection.

Joanna Holewa Chrona started her collaboration with South African artists in 2015, with the Pantsula dance company Real Actions. Her engagement has only increased since then, through her dance company and non-profit organization, AFIA, which celebrates African cultures and connecting people, and whose board consists of board members from both Sweden and South Africa. Afia hosts an annual festival called ‘AFIA FESTIVAL’ showcasing South African culture since 2016.

Many of Joanna’s works have South African-inspired music, lyrics, and movements. Joanna’s interest lies in respectfully combining cultures and perspectives, always with the cooperation of all participating artists. One of AFIAS recent and still touring pieces is YEBO YES! With a Swedish/South African cast and creative team. Joanna has also formed a duo with Yared Tilahun Cederlund called LAND BEFORE TIME.

As of 2024/2025 Joanna is for the first time embarking a journey as a solo-choreographer and solo-dancer on stage with the piece “Phakathi Inside”.

“Singing more than one part, telling more than one story, at the same time,
No voice surrenders its individual identity, nor does any one voice steal the show,
There is no front person, no soloist, no leader.”
“When I soften my hearing, something happens.
The many songs coalesce to make one song that doesn’t exist in any of the one voices alone.
It is an emergent song that I can’t find by unravelling the music into its separate strand!”
– “Entangled Life” by Merlin Sheldrake

Fast-paced sequences, rhythmic movements, and precise group choreographies characterise the South African dance isiPantsula, which is simultaneously marked by virtuosity and a spirit of
resistance. The subculture Pantsula emerged in the Sophiatown district of Johannesburg during the violent expulsion of Blacks during Apartheid. It became a shared expression and identity that unified the 11 ethnic groups of the country. The dance style isiPantsula evolved from traditional dances and theatrical gestures of daily life and was used as a means of communication during demonstrations.

YEBO YES! is a full lenght dance performance starring artistic leaders Joanna Holewa Chrona and Theresa Gustavsson from Sweden together with co-creating dancers and pantsula choreographers Sibusiso Mthembu, Patricia Gugu Mofokeng and David Mokale from South Africa.

The dancers blend isiPantsula with freestyle and club culture emphasizing character, individual expression, playfulness, unity and drive in an homage to the expressive power of this dance – an electrifying group dynamic and a strong community that never seems to end.

Premiere: 12 November 2021, Dansens Hus, Stockholm

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AFIA is a non profit organisation that produce culture events and performing art to celebrate, acknowledge and strengthen African traditions/cultures and Streetdances from the African Diaspora, and to broaden the culture range of expressions. AFIAs aim is to create plattforms where people can meet, exchange, educate, learn and celebrate.

AFIA is founded by Joanna Holewa Chrona and Theresa Gustavsson, both born and raised in Sweden and currently situated in Malmö/Johannesburg. The NGO has since then grown and now consist of board members and resident artists/ambassadors from both Sweden, South Africa and many more countries. Sibusiso Mthembu, Patricia Mofokeng and David Mokale being three of the artistic ambassadors and board members.

How does one reconnect with one’s roots once settled in a new land? Winnie dives into her estranged and distant relationship with Hong Kong, her birthplace, by moving through the complexities of her diaspora and her queerness. She explores a traditional Chinese cooking instrument, the wok, and immerses herself in wok chi (鑊氣), the wok energy, which gives Cantonese cuisine its distinct taste. By sensorially examining the methods and the materials used in Cantonese cooking, she aims to listen and re-connect intimately with her ancestry.

Premiere: 21 September 2022, Agora du Coeur des Sciences in Montreal

About Winnie Ho

Winnie Ho is an interdisciplinary dance performance artist and curator who was born in Hong Kong, and currently resides in Montreal.

Her work embraces multiple disciplines including immersive installations, sculpture and dance. Weaving in various materials onto her body and inventing queer folklore/mythologies have been the fore-front of her dance making practice.

Presently, she is working with notions of grief, pleasure and play as both a personal ceremonial practice and a public performance. Winnie was awarded the Laureate of the Power Prix 2022 scholarship award at La Centrale Gallarie Powerhouse in Montreal. She was also the recipient of the 2017 Danceweb Scholarship Program at Impulstanz Festival in Vienna.

Her passion of working in experimental and DIY structure and spaces has lead her to create immersive installations and performances at Ponderosa Festival in Stolzenhagan, Germany, MIX Festival in New York City, Out There Festival in Portugal, VIVA Festival, Articule Gallery and La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse in Montreal.

Her latest solo work aWokening was premiered at Danse-cité in 2023. aWokening is an immersive sensorial experience of sound, smell and touch over metallic landscapes.

Immortal summit is a performance that stretches between ideas of greatness and delusions of grandeur. Two characters are bound to an immortal fate and trapped in an ambivalent reality where remembrance of humanity’s excessive behaviors is put on display. Searching for something different, immortal summit lives in the borderland of provocation and play, tenderness, and failure, asking questions of how to navigate one’s existence in a non-voluntary reality.

In immortal summit Lydia Östberg Diakité and BamBam Frost work with materials inspired by sports, gods and popular cultural icons. Studying the phenomena of iconization and the canonization of performance abilities, where impossible levels and high expectations are the new standard.

Premiere: 11 November 2021, MDT Stockholm

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RADIO III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ is an indigenous futuristic concert, a beautiful and uncomfortable dance performance and a perverse triangle of shifting power that seeks to be unfaithful to both minimalism and postmodern dance’s claims to so-called “neutrality”. As we live, layer and situate form in our bodies we hurtle through past, present and possible futures.

We invite you into a supportive co-existence, separate but aligned, an anthem for xenophilia, a complicit dream, a consensual prophecy.

Exhilarated by a common interest in minimalism in art and music, we are asking how we can work on the performativity and spatial principles of minimalism while being unfaithful to its recognizable aesthetic and its claim to so-called ‘neutrality’. We are on the lookout for a dance that haunts the recognizable toolbox of abstraction, form, repetition and pattern by making visible what should not be seen. We feel compelled to explore a dance that is vested in expression but not (only) in self-expression. How can we diffuse and displace the expressive and physical dynamics of the dance and music material? Where can we go after the minimalist turn of Yvonne Rainer’s dramatic No Manifesto’s negation of spectacle, virtuosity, image and style other than to Mette Ingvartsen’s subsequent Yes Manifesto’s reformulation of virtuosity? What could be a third? When in a bind, caught in the antagonism of the binary, add a third. We are interested in exploring the poetics and the politics of a third: not to locate and to position this third (do we really need more than left, center and right, beginning, middle and end?!) but to generate a methodology that works on positioning as a verb which entails noticing changing relations without staking ownership on a particular place (conceptual or physical).

We are using the notion of the background (as in background/foreground) as a way to investigate the relations through which things are made visible and invisible. We are looking into the image and function of wallpaper and the (invisibilized) backup singer to help us make dance scores, influence the dynamics of our dancing and music compositions, unison movements and the imprinting of a room with multiple and simultaneous patterns.

Premiere: 3 June 3 2019, MAI, Montréal

Elisa Harkins, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines and Zoë Poluch came together in 2019 to create Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ. The work was born in part from a common interest in minimalism in art and music in relation to counter-colonial processes. Elisa Harkins is a Native American (Cherokee/Muscogee) artist and composer based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work is concerned with translation, language preservation, and Indigenous musicology.

Hanako Hoshimi-Caines is an experimental dance artist and curator born and based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her works play within the expanded fields of choreography and interdisciplinary practice exploring notions of ritual and play, the ontology of the fourth wall and the spirit of error.

Zoë Poluch’s artistic practice puts into motion different mediums and takes shape in different rooms. Her relationship with the “contemporary dance” scene is based on a long term and practice-based interest in the politics and poetics of moving and sensing. She is based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ is their first collaboration.