HOT LUNCH | Dancing from Hammanskraal to New York

Paul Modjadji is home until October. It’s an unusually long stay after five years in which he has rarely spent more than two months in South Africa.

His life appears to have been conducted at several thousand creative revolutions per minute: dancer, choreographer, actor, filmmaker, writer, creative director, global wanderer and more recently, brain-health advocate. But today he is meeting me at Bootlegger in Hyde Park Corner for a brunch interlude fresh from a sculpt yoga class that he claims nearly finished him off. It was much hotter than expected.

These days he lives in Brooklyn, New York, after a couple of years in London. But home, in that visceral sense, remains Hammanskraal, rooted in a childhood that he remembers as particularly happy.

His maternal grandfather owned taxis, his grandmother ran a tuck shop, his father was super entrepreneurial. There was always, as Modjadji puts it, “money moving around”: somebody starting something, buying something, selling something. “You think the life you have is just the life you have,” he says. “But now I realise there was so much enterprising around me.”

The other inheritance was creativity. His movie-obsessed uncle rented videos every weekend, and we reminisce about this lost weekly delight that framed so many weekends. The critical rental choice and the burden of the Sunday returns.

Modjadji grew up devouring everything from Mad Max to Footloose. Music played constantly, cousins congregated at his grandmother’s house and people danced because they were that sort of family.

“Looking back, all the things I’m doing now were somehow there already.”

His first foray overseas came immediately after school. Modjadji was one of five teenage agony aunts (an excellent phrase whatever your age) for youth newspaper Free 4 All. An advertisement for a student exchange programme caught his eye and he headed to Denmark intending to spend a gap year finding himself. Within his first week he walked into a dance school, was spotted and won its annual scholarship. Serendipitously, his passion for the form was born.

He returned to South Africa, enrolled at Tshwane University of Technology and, in his second year, was headhunted for television soap Backstage. He left after a year, returning to dance and choreography while simultaneously writing and producing for television.

It is tempting, retrospectively, to impose a clean trajectory on a career such as his. In reality, it has been a glorious series of creative projects that sparked his interest and passion.

Like many artists, Modjadji financed the thing he loved by developing adjacent skills that paid the rent. Scriptwriting, production and television kept the lights on while dance gradually began to do the same.

Then, in 2011, Modjadji won the jazz category at the DanceStar World Masters, becoming the first African dancer to win his category. “That win opened so much for me.” Among the projects that followed was Breaking Down Borders Africa, a documentary series in which he travelled the continent using dance as a way into stories about culture, youth and identity.

This year it won a Silver Telly Award for best travel and tourism television series at the 47th Telly Awards, following a nomination for outstanding documentary series at South Africa’s National Arts and Culture Awards and selection among the top six international travel shows in the Black Travel Summit pitch competition in Brazil.

A second season is now in development, shifting its gaze towards poetry, with Modjadji increasingly behind the camera.

He hasn’t abandoned dance. The reason he is home now is that he was commissioned to creative-direct and choreograph the 70th anniversary commemoration of the Women’s March, attended by the president. Years earlier he worked on the 20 Years of Democracy celebrations. Landmark national moments have become a beautiful thread throughout his career.

But the larger arc is increasingly film, and another strand of his filmmaking has taken him somewhere he never expected: dementia. Modjadji was recruited into a fellowship with the Global Brain Health Institute in Ireland, spending a year working alongside neurologists and researchers to explore how creativity might be used both as intervention and to communicate complex medical knowledge to ordinary people.

The answer, in his case, was storytelling and the remarkable healing power of creative practice. His documentary-feature Hearts Remember explores dementia through personal stories, including that of legendary football coach Clive Barker. The film has since travelled internationally, including presentations at ageing and dementia conferences, while Modjadji is now preparing its South African rollout during World Alzheimer’s Month in September.

He is passionate about what he sees as an enormous deficit in public understanding of dementia here, particularly in black communities.

“People are living with someone who is changing and they don’t necessarily understand what they’re experiencing.”

The creative arts themselves are increasingly part of conversations around brain health. Music, movement, drawing and other creative engagement can offer stimulation and connection for people living with dementia. Modjadji has become fascinated by the relationship between creativity, movement, social connection and keeping the brain engaged.

His professional blueprint remains Debbie Allen: dancer, choreographer, actor, director and producer. “For those of us who always felt dance wasn’t enough, she’s the template.”

That appetite for multiplicity explains New York. Modjadji moved there three years ago, wanting to build bridges between African creators and the US entertainment industry.

“For years we’ve had American content coming at us. But they haven’t necessarily had the same opportunity to experience the work that we do.”

Does he miss South Africa? Home, he says, is warmth, humour and people greeting you properly. It is the extraordinary South African capacity to survive difficulty without surrendering levity.

“Even when things are really tough, we still laugh. We still braai. You can go to a funeral and there is still that warmth. There’s an energy here you can’t replicate.”