The dance-opera, which premiered this week in Cape Town, is as much an audience-pleaser as it is a phantasmagoric multidisciplinary collaboration.

In an interview towards the end of 2024, shortly before the great South African dancer Gregory Maqoma's retirement from performing, he told me that as a choreographer he places a high premium on collaboration, that in the rehearsal room everyone has something to offer.

He also said that the audience, although not present in the rehearsal studio, is perhaps the most significant collaborator of all.

"The most important thing for me, and something that I always think about when making work or choreographing a piece, is the audience," he said. "Because ultimately, it is about them. The work is telling a story that needs to be relatable to an audience. It is relating stories that the audience needs to be inspired by. In any work I create, the audience is among my collaborators. They are there with me in the space."

Genesis: The Beginning and End of Time is Maqoma's newest work, fresh from the rehearsal room for a brief run at The Baxter in Cape Town. It's a kind of groundbreaking, multivalent dance opera that fuses movement and intense physicality with haunting voices, scintillating music and a fascinating libretto (by the French-Indian poet Karthika Naïr)...