Kamilla Newman sat with her long hair scrunched in a pony, squinting through her glasses as she tried to formulate an answer to my question: Why do you dance on UCT campus?
“Nobody gets the reason. Essentially what the events were: it was orientation last year (2015) and I got to campus early. I had an hour to spare. There was a wonderful area in front of a pond, that I now know as the Jammie Plaza. So I put down my stuff and I was in a musical mood and spontaneously thought that it was an open area, I’m not bothering anyone. So I started dancing. “
“I think it was a good stress reliever at that moment. Good for my nervous energy. Good get me in my own head and body, and make me feel more like myself. It was very therapeutic the first time.”
Kamilla carefully selects her words. She appears entirely different in person than on Jammie plaza, more careful and more calculated. This humbling experience.
We sat in Jammeson Hall on the campus of the University of Cape Town, beneath the arching ceiling, hunched in our jackets to keep warm. The three of us were dwarfed by the large hall and our mousy voices echoed against the wood. The three of us sat there, discussing dance, anime and navigating life in university.
We were a rather bizarre trio. I sat there with my pen and paper, eager to hear about Kamilla’s dancing. She sat in a light red sweater, hair scrunched up and smiling. Tristan, a friend and fellow classmate of Kamilla’s, had a small digital camera carefully trained on our faces. We were all wet from the rain, trying to huddle up and conduct an interview that seemed out of place in this large hall.
Kamilla is pursuing a BA degree in English and Classical Studies at the University of Cape Town. She has never had a formal hip-hop dance class. Kamilla shares her dance history as being mostly focused on ballet.
As we spoke, Kamilla slowly revealed her motivation behind her dancing on campus.
Many mused about the odd girl plugged into her phone, dancing on Jammie Plaza seemingly oblivious to the rest of the world buzzing around her. Rumours about a confidence building technique, social experiment or a dancing exercise soared around campus. When I first asked Kamilla about it, she said “Wow! Are people actually theorising about my dancing? I never thought I would be theorised about.”
I was interested to find out more, so Kamilla and I quickly set a date for our interview.
Is it an expression of self?
“Possibly. Wait, no. It’s more of a conduit. It’s less about me and more about what I am listening to, passing through me and being shown to the world. There is a particular message in songs that I want to find and show. “
“Through expressing yourself, you give others freedom to express,” says Kamilla.
How has the meaning of dancing shifted?
“In a sense, it hasn’t. It is still the same thing as it was last year. In a way, I still feel like the first fresh-faced student in university with no idea what the area around me is, and just trying to get back something I feel like I’ve lost since coming under a heavy workload, more social pressures and more family pressures. It’s still a release in a lot of ways. But it has also changed in the way that it means something not just to me but to other people as well. Meeting people, amazing people has happened which I would never have imagined.
“It’s a strange thing to think of, that doing something that random and out of the ordinary would not garner attention. I honestly did not think of it that way when I started. I had absolutely no thoughts when I started. Now whenever I get back to doing it, whenever I start on Jammie Plaza again, the very first thing I do is clear my mind of any sort of expectations, perceptions. I understand I’m sharing a space with other people, but it doesn’t colour how or why I do what I do. Because I have a tendency to overthink then I feel like the messages I bring through will be influenced by how other people think of how I dance.”
