Buckville perform Love Me (Official Music Video), 2012

At the age of 13 he started This Is Africa, a Hip Hop dance crew comprising of Kalima, Chisala, Chitukuta “C Fresh” and Faith Rapoo. The crew were a match made in heaven and a raving success, well versed in breakdancing, pop locking and krumping. The goal was to strengthen their skills when it came to Hip Hop dance and they’d periodically engage in battles and sign up for competitions to test their skills. Through their frequent performances at high schools around Gaborone they built a solid fanbase but as their stardom rose, so did their personal ambitions, ultimately sending each member in different directions. Kalima took the opportunity to strengthen his bonds with other dancers and crews in Gaborone and took to practicing with the well known, now defunct, Buckville Donkeez. “I wasn’t going to stop dancing, I knew that, so when the crew disbanded I just aligned myself with people I already knew who shared the same interests.” Buckville Donkeez was a Hip Hop dance crew that consisted of Ndiye Christmas, Mothusi “Seeks” Maxwell, Oatile “ATI” Ramsay and Koby Buckville. Kalima danced with Buckville for about a year and did a lot of performances at Maru A Pula school. MaP, as it’s called, is the home of Maitisong, the premiere centre for performing arts in Botswana. “They taught me a lot and I respected them as well, they were my friends and we all knew how good everyone was. They were a strong crew and one of the few that I knew would definitely go toe to toe with T.I.A if we were to battle.”

T.I.A Dance Crew at The Shakedown, published Classic Cj Productions, 2012

Kalima’s commitment to the craft would pay off. After finishing High School he got the opportunity to further deepen his roots in the dance scene by studying at Vuyani Dance Theatre (Now Vuyani Dance Company) in Johannesburg. Vuyani was mainly a contemporary and afro fusion dance academy but it had a vast curriculum that included ballet, latin and Hip Hop classes. The offer affirmed that he indeed was going in the right direction. “There’s usually about a year that one has to go through studying the technical aspect of dance upon enrolment but after my audition the school decided to exempt me from that year because of how skilled I was. It was one of the first times that it really hit me how good at this I actually am. It was humbling, to say the least.” In her conversation with Samiya Quayim Layla Ghaleb mentions how her first go at Urban Dance Camp was an early attempt at taking the direction of her career into her own hands, reeling from losing her crew as well. In Layla’s case, the crew didn’t disband, they kicked her out over her refusal to perform at venues that didn’t align with her values. Still a teenager, she buckled under the pressure but returned to prove Eminem and everybody else wrong by taking a second shot and landing it, that first shot wasn’t her sole chance to blow after all. “The second time around was better – my mentality was different,” shared Ghaleb “This alone made me not stress about the classes, and I was actually doing well from a skill point of view. It was the best experience of my life.”

In 2010 Kalima’s life would change forever when he met the man who would go on to be his mentor, Andrew Letso Kola, the Founder and Artistic Director of Mophato Dance Theatre. “We were at a flash mob audition and I guess I stood out. I picked up the routine easily and I was able to perform different styles of dance with ease. After the auditions he took me aside and said he wanted to take me under his wing because he saw my potential and from there he started teaching me everything that he knows.” His love for African contemporary dance grew intensely as he performed his first contemporary production Hayani directed by South African Artistic Director Luyanda Sidiya in 2010. As a junior dancer in 2010 and 2011 Kalima Mipata pushed through dance barriers to feature in more productions to secure him a position as senior dancer in 2012.

“Going to Joburg definitely solidified my parents’ faith in my craft. Obviously with African parents you have to prove to them that you can make it on your own when you deviate from a set path. They saw that dance wasn’t just a hobby it was a thing that was literally opening up doors for me. The first time I got on a plane was because of dance, to head to the 15th Metro FM Awards in Durban. The first time I saw the beach and the ocean was because of dance. I was part of a crew of dancers performing at the Metro FM Awards and we did routines for the likes of DA LES and AKA and Kwaito heavyweights like Mandoza, Trompies and Oskido. My parents were able to actually see what I do on TV because the awards were broadcast on SABC 1. When I got off stage I found a text from my dad telling me that they’d watched my performance and how proud of me he was. It just inspired me to go harder and see how much further I could take this” he shares.

In a world where authenticity can either make you a cherished or shunned individual (because everyone has such a visceral response to one not only being “different” but being in flow with where that aforementioned difference and one’s receptivity to it leads) the Universe seemed to constantly affirm that Mipata was on the right track - that indeed, his path was real and laid out for him. His dedication and discipline constantly set him apart from the rest and as he grew the old guard of Mophato Dance Theatre were in agreement that he had something special worth nurturing. “They believed in me and I didn’t take that for granted. It made me want to prove to them that they’d made the right decision in investing in me. Every new task, every new dance I threw myself into it with all my heart.”

His past experience as the leader of T.I.A had set him up to easily acclimatise to being part of a troupe. The long days spent perfecting routines, fuelled mostly by ambition and audacity, had moulded him into someone who was creatively a force to be reckoned with and a leader who was capable of recognising other people’s talents and helping them to hone them. What had started out as a personal interest mostly focused on Hip Hop dance and rap music in general had over the years grown to be a means to foster community with others who, like him, felt a deeper connection to music and movement and as he grew, so too did his scope of capabilities and interests. “It actually wasn’t difficult to make that switch from being identified as a Hip Hop dancer to branching out into contemporary dance because I’d never boxed myself in, even when I was just dancing on my own,” he shares. “I always wanted to learn new stuff. I allowed my body to change and I pushed it to its limits and beyond. There was nothing I felt I couldn’t do. And even when I was nervous to try something new, I’d try it nonetheless and end up grasping it.” This transformation is one Ghaleb touches on as well - what one becomes beyond the scope of Hip Hop, its fandom, and their place in it, in reality. In her words, her style is more “open style choreography” than Hip Hop dance at this point. Like Mipata, she’s trained and learned Hip Hop however it’s but a fraction of their expertise and routines now. It’s a part of something bigger. “Hip-hop has specific moves with specific names. What I do is very freeing. It doesn't have any boundaries,” shares Ghaleb. “I can do a move from hip-hop, but then I can also do an afro move or a classical move or a jazz-funk move, creating a mix of everything, so there's still a lot to teach. People always say, ‘Oh, you're a hip-hop dancer.’ And you know what? I just go with it because it's a very long story.”

“When I joined Mophato and we started deepening our knowledge of Tswana traditional dance it sort of felt like a full circle moment because I’d already grasped a basic knowledge of the movements and styles when I was younger,” says Kalima. “In Grade 5 I’d done Tswana Traditional Dance at the school I went to and so it was just a matter of remembering what I’d learned then and building on that. I can confidently say now that I’ve mastered all the different styles of Tswana Traditional Dance. I choreograph routines often and I’m one of the best at it.”

The aforementioned flow that Kalima sees as a definite sign of dance being his destiny also helped him ease into the personal changes that came with his growth. When I ask him about navigating the difference between where he started out and the crowds he used to perform for then, and where he finds himself now - a highly coveted choreographer and overall performer who’s essentially a corporate darling - he takes a minute to think on his evolution. “I’ll be honest, none of it feels strange. Even though I’m traveling a lot and doing all of these high end, serious things, in my personal life I never really left those “urban” spaces. A lot of my friends are performers and musicians, I’m also a musician. It feels like I have grown to be able to have the best of both worlds.”