DANCE INTO WOMANHOOD: A JOURNEY THROUGH RITUAL, RHYTHM AND PORTRAITS
In 2019, I travelled to Lesotho, a small mountainous kingdom surrounded by South Africa, to film a project for FIFA alongside director Richard Horne.
Once filming had finished, we decided to venture further into the country, driving through the spectacular mountain landscape towards the remote village of Malealea.
Lesotho is an extraordinary place. Vast open landscapes, winding mountain roads and small rural communities where life seems to move at an entirely different pace.
As we drove along one of these roads, we came across something quite unexpected.
A group of young girls, dressed in traditional costumes, were performing a dance by the roadside, accompanied by elderly women. We pulled over, intrigued by what we were witnessing.
The girls wore woven skirts, their bodies decorated with clay, paint and brightly coloured beads. Some wore masks, while others had names painted across their backs, including Chief Makotoko and Chief Leisaboo.
We had stumbled upon Lebollo la Basali, a traditional female initiation practice marking the transition from girlhood into womanhood, deeply rooted in Basotho culture and identity.
But it was the singing that really captivated me.
There was something almost hypnotic about it. The rhythm, the voices, the movement of their bodies. It was intoxicating, and I remember feeling completely absorbed by what was unfolding in front of us.
I began filming and taking photographs, trying to capture the energy and emotion of the moment.
Yet when I looked back at the photographs, something was missing.
The individual images were beautiful, but they felt too static. They didn't convey the extraordinary rhythm and movement I had experienced.
It wasn't until a year later, during the COVID lockdown, that I returned to the photographs and began experimenting.
I selected eight frames, taken just seconds apart, and started layering them together. Gradually, the individual figures began to overlap, creating a sense of movement, almost as though the dance was continuing within the photograph.
Suddenly, I felt I had something that came much closer to what I'd witnessed that day.
The resulting image, Dance Into Womanhood, is less about documenting a single moment and more about capturing the feeling of being there.
The rhythm, the energy, the colour and, above all, the emotion.
It's one of the things I love most about photography. Sometimes the image you remember isn't quite the image you captured. And occasionally, you have to find another way of expressing what you felt.
That brief encounter on a roadside in Lesotho has stayed with me ever since.
Watch the video below
