Dance
Tebza is the champion of Dance Your Style South Africa 2018. At the world final he's aiming to share his passion and knowledge of the Pantsula style with the rest of the world.
Teboho 'Tebza' Diphehlo is hoping to share the wealth. Originally from Soweto, South Africa, the renowned dancer has a goal of putting his home town on the map, thanks to the Pantsula style.
Last year, Tebza won Red Bull’s inaugural Dance Your Style event in Johannesburg and he explains that Soweto is home to a bustling dance scene outside of the Pantsula form. He says that in Soweto, there’s a wide range of musical genres and dance and most South African dance styles find their roots in the town.
The performer, who's in his mid-20s, says that he was inspired to dance by watching family and, as a child, he was inspired to join the Pantsula movement after experiencing a dance battle at his school.
“I saw a big crowd of pupils making noise by whistling and chanting, but I couldn’t see what was happening inside the circle,” he recollects. “For a while I struggled to find my way, but at the end I managed to get to the front and it was then when my life changed forever. I never looked back, I wanted to do the same. I realized that dancing Pantsula made everyone happy and I was so happy ever since I saw that Pantsula dancer. I wanted to do the same, to be happy and make everyone happy.” Tebza got more involved in the artform during the early-2000s, when he joined a local dance crew that specialised in Pantsula. He was exposed to various competitions and other platforms where he was able to meet other dancers throughout the Gauteng province.
The Pantsula style of dance is high-energy, and is as exciting to learn about as it is to watch. The name of the dance form is an abbreviation of the first letters of every South African tribe, and the style of the language, Tsotsi Taal, is a mixture of every South African language. Tebza explains that every time Pantsula is danced, the history of the country and the personal struggles of the inhabitants of South Africa is expressed in an effort to educate onlookers.
As a performer who aims to take the Pantsula style far and beyond South Africa, Tebza has taught various dance workshops with his Soweto-based dance crew, Intellectuals Pantsula, as well as throughout Europe for “hungry” performers as a solo entity. He also appeared on So You Think You Can Dance, where he was among the top 25 contestants and eventually worked as an assistant choreographer on the show.
For this year’s Red Bull Dance Your Style World Final he's excited to continue spreading knowledge about Pantsula. As for what he'll be bringing to the table this time around as the champ of 2018, we will just have to wait and see.
“I hope that people will learn about what my country can offer when it comes to the quality of dance,” he says. “There are a lot of interesting dance genres in South Africa that I mostly incorporate with my Pantsula. In other words, I will be sharing a unique quality of dance with the people and I believe that I’m one of the few people that will be dancing entirely different compared to many dancers I will be sharing the platform with. For people to learn more about my country and the style I will be doing, I need to be great.”
As with most performers, Tebza’s road to success was not an easy one. He explains that he dealt with a family who were not as supportive as he’d hoped during the beginning of his career. He details that the problem began after his passion for dance grew bigger and he started devoting less and less time to his studies. His family got him a job as a deli assistant, but he would get in trouble for dancing in the kitchen. After realising that not only did their son has talent and passion, they became 100 percent supportive of his dreams. “My mom is always the first student and client in my workshops,” he says with a laugh.
“Choosing dance as your career is not a walk in the park,” he continues. “Where I come from, many people consider what I do as just dancing behind musicians and getting exploited. I’ve been called to low-budget gigs or no-paying gigs. On many occasions, I struggled to pay my bills because the money that I was getting from this industry wasn’t enough to maintain my standard of living.”
Throughout his dance journey, Tebza says that the underlying lesson he’s learned has been patience. He’s hoping to exercise that patience in order to have the blessings he’s worked so hard to achieve accumulate when the time is right. Until then, he’s grateful for the experiences dance has rewarded him with thus far.
“There was a point where I wanted every opportunity to come my way, but no! Opportunities fell to people that deserved them at that specific time, people always said my time will come, so I waited,” he says. ‘So now, at this moment, it’s actually that time I waited for all my life. I’m living my dream. Dancing makes me happy compared to anything I can imagine, it takes me high when I’m low and it makes me forget about all the frustrations of living in a poor township.”