Tossie van Tonder (71) is a South African dance pioneer and practicing psychologist. In Requiem-to-Come, she dances the piano and engages her voice as an embodied response to the immense worldly and ecological challenges shaping our time.

Her performances become portals through which grief, beauty, violence, memory, and transformation move. They ask what humankind might become as systems, atrocities, and ways of living that are no longer life-giving begin to die away. There are many more requiems still to come.

At the same time, the performance acts as a form of reparation — linking substance and form with the formless mysteries of existence, the visible world with unseen experience.

Through the weaving of stories, movement, sound, and presence, Tossie reminds us of something increasingly vital in contemporary life: the role of creativity in rendering the world liveable.