South African choreographer PJ Sabbagha has been named the 2026 JOMBA! Legacy Artist, recognising decades of work advancing dance, activism and community development.
The 28th annual JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience has announced that acclaimed choreographer, arts activist and cultural leader PJ Sabbagha will receive its prestigious 2026 JOMBA! Legacy Artist honour.
Hosted by the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Creative Arts, the festival will celebrate Sabbagha’s significant contribution to South African dance and his commitment to using the arts as a tool for social change.
Sabbagha is best known as the founding member and Managing and Artistic Director of The Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative (FATC), an organisation that has spent more than three decades developing contemporary dance and community-based arts programmes across South Africa.
He also founded the Ebhudlweni Arts Centre and the annual My Body My Space Rural Public Arts Festival, both of which have played important roles in expanding access to arts and cultural opportunities in underserved communities.
Over the years, Sabbagha has received numerous accolades, including the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Dance and multiple awards recognising his choreographic excellence. His work has been showcased internationally in countries including France, Russia, Mexico, Tanzania, Mozambique and Taiwan.
Beyond the stage, Sabbagha has become recognised for championing arts development in rural areas and creating opportunities for artists and communities often excluded from mainstream cultural spaces.
According to JOMBA! Artistic Director Dr Lliane Loots, the award acknowledges not only Sabbagha’s artistic achievements but also his enduring commitment to community empowerment and cultural transformation.
“The JOMBA! festival’s 2026 overall curatorial theme and provocation is Choreographies of Activism: Moving Bodies as Disruptive Presenting and we can think of no other South African artist who has exemplified this moving across physical, economic and access borders in his dance work, whether this has been training and teaching, choreography, or curation,” said Loots.
To mark the honour, Sabbagha and FATC will open the festival with a reimagined presentation of NOAH, a multimedia dance production exploring themes of loss, love, climate change and collective responsibility.
The work combines live performance, video projection and visual imagery to examine personal and global responses to crisis and change.
JOMBA! will take place at the Sneddon Theatre in Durban from 25 August to 6 September 2026, followed by a satellite programme at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg from 9 to 12 September.
The recognition of PJ Sabbagha as the 2026 JOMBA! Legacy Artist highlights the growing importance of artists who use creativity not only to entertain, but also to build communities, challenge inequality and inspire social dialogue.
