The colonial histories of South Africa and Australia have much in common. Issues of land, cultural collision and how today chooses to look at the events of the past are hot topics in both societies. So like the blistering Transvaal-located Mies Julie that came to Perth International Arts Festival two years ago, Gregory Maqoma’s potent one man dance performance Exit/Exist has special resonances that cannot fail to go unnoticed.

Soweto-born Maqoma began formal training in 1990, but cites Michael Jackson and 1980s pop culture alongside traditional Xhosa, Zulu and Basotho dances as formative influences. Founding Vuyani Dance Theatre in 1999, he’s since worked with Akram Khan and other practitioners at the fissile coalface of dance theatre, and nowadays describes his unique choreographic style as a “cocktail of genres, traditions and histories”.

Maqoma describes Exit/Exist as “rewinding the tape”, and a sense of time – from clock projections to sand pouring through an hourglass – is critical to his excavation of the life of one of his ancestors. The 19th-century Xhosa leader of the same name lead a guerrilla campaign against the British colonial invasion in 1837. Eventually captured...