Stage Africa Terms of Use, Version 1.1

This is version 1.1, which applied from 22 September 2026 until 1 October 2026. Read the version in effect now.

About These Terms

These terms govern your use of the Stage Africa website at stage.africa. The site is published by Burtronix CC (registration number 1996/045193/23), trading as Stage Africa, whom these terms mean by "we" and "us".

They cover more than one place, because Stage Africa is more than one place:

• This website at stage.africa, including the directory, the articles, and a member's own entry and profile.
• Our forum at forum.stage.africa, which you enter with your Stage Africa account.
• A website we build and run for a member from their own entry, on a domain of ours. If you have one of those, these terms cover what we do for you there; they say nothing about your own separate website if you have one of those too.

By using any of them you accept these terms. There is nothing to sign in order to read; if you do not accept them, please do not use the site. If you hold an account with us, you accepted these terms when you took it up, or when we asked you after that, and they keep applying for as long as you have it.

These terms work with our privacy notice, which explains what personal information we collect and why. Where the two speak to the same thing, the privacy notice governs how we handle your personal information and these terms govern everything else.

We can be reached at privacy@stage.africa for anything about these terms or your information, and through the contact form for everything else.

Who May Use the Site

Anyone may read this site. Reading needs no account, and most of what we publish is open to everybody.

Some of it needs one. A member account is what lets you claim your entry in our directory, write your own profile, add your own pictures, and take part in our forum.

The site is a publication written for adults: dancers, teachers, studio owners, and people who are interested in the field. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18.

You must be 18 or older to hold an account. We ask you to confirm it and we take your word for it: we do not check anybody's age and we do not collect a date of birth. If we learn that an account belongs to somebody under 18 we close it. If you believe one does, tell us at privacy@stage.africa and we will look.

The newsletter is for adults. Please do not subscribe if you are under 18. If we learn that a subscriber is under 18 we stop sending immediately and remove the subscription. We keep the minimum needed to make sure we do not add the address back, and nothing else.

None of that stops a child appearing on this site. A photograph of a dance class is a photograph of children, and the section on photographs of other people says what we ask of whoever uploads one.

If you believe we hold information about someone under 18, tell us at privacy@stage.africa and we will act.

Your Account

An account is how the site knows you are you. It lets you claim your entry in our directory, write your own profile, add your own pictures, and take part in our forum.

To get one you give us an e-mail address and set your own password. Nobody here chooses or sees your password. We send a link to the address and the account works once you have followed it, because an account we cannot reach is an account nobody can get back into. At times we may only open accounts to people we have invited, and the site will say so where you would otherwise sign up.

The forum is a second piece of software and your account carries you into it, so you do not sign in twice. It has no login of its own, so your Stage Africa account is the only way in.

Keep it to yourself. Your password is yours, and anything done from your account is treated as done by you. If you think somebody else has been in it, tell us at privacy@stage.africa and we will help you shut it down. We offer two-factor sign-in and we recommend it, particularly if you look after an organisation's entry.

One account, one person. Please do not share an account or hand it on to somebody else when you leave a job. More than one person can hold a claim on the same entry, which is how a studio and its principal both look after it, and each of them has their own account. If a studio changes hands, or the person who looks after an entry changes, write to us and we will move the claim rather than the password.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, that is being used to impersonate somebody, or that we have good reason to believe is not held by the person it says it is. Except where we cannot, we will tell you why and give you a chance to answer. Where the problem is one piece of content rather than the account, we take down the content and leave the account alone.

You can close your account whenever you like, on the site with Close Account, under Sign-In and Security on your account page, or by writing to us. On the site we send a link to your address, and the account closes when you open the link and confirm. Closing deletes the account, and it cannot be undone. What happens to what you put here is not the same for all of it, and our privacy notice sets it out in full. The short version is that what only you look after comes down, what you look after with somebody else stays with them without your pictures, and what we compiled ourselves stays in the directory.

Closing an account does not delete what you have written in the forum. Other people's conversations would stop making sense, so posts stay unless there is a reason to remove one. When you close your account on the site we ask whether your name stays on them, and if you write to us to close it, tell us.

How the Site May Be Used

You may read the site, share links to it, and quote from it as the law allows and as the licence on each item permits.

When you use the site, please do not:

• break the law, or infringe anyone else' rights;
• interfere with the site, attack it, or try to reach parts of it that are not published;
• automate access in a way that degrades the site for other people, ignores our published crawling rules, or works around a limit we have set;
• misuse the contact form or the newsletter, including sending another person's address or using either to distribute unsolicited mail; or
• present our material as your own, or strip the credit from something that carries one.

If you hold an account, there are five more, and they are the ones that matter in a room with other people in it:

• Do not publish anything that is not yours to publish. A photograph you found, a description copied from somebody else' website, a logo that belongs to a different business.
• Do not claim an entry that is not yours, or hold yourself out as somebody you are not.
• Do not publish somebody else' personal information, including a photograph of them, without their agreement. The section on photographs of other people says what we ask.
• Do not use the forum to harass, threaten, or abuse anybody, or to post content that is unlawful, hateful, or sexual. Disagreeing hard about technique is fine. This is a small field and people have to work together afterwards.
• Do not use what you can see here to build a mailing list, a competing directory, or anything else the people listed did not agree to. That includes scraping the directory.

If something on this site, in our forum, or on a website we run for a member is unlawful, infringes your rights, or should not be there, tell us and we will act. Write to privacy@stage.africa, say which page or which picture, say what is wrong with it, and give us a way to reach you. You do not need a formal notice for us to act. We would rather take something down and put it back than leave it up while we argue. We do not read every forum post before it appears and we are not required to, so telling us is how we find out.

Our designated agent is Andries Petrus (Riaan) Burger. That is the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act's term for the person we have named to receive a take-down notice, which is the formal written notice that something we host is unlawful or infringes someone's rights. You may send one to him by e-mail or by post, and under that Act it must include:

• your full name and address;
• your signature, written or electronic;
• the right you say has been infringed;
• the material or activity you say is unlawful;
• what you want us to do about it;
• your telephone number and e-mail address, if you have them;
• a statement that you are acting in good faith; and
• a statement that what the notice says is, to your knowledge, true and correct.

Anyone who sends a take-down notice knowing that it materially misrepresents the facts is liable for damages for a wrongful take-down. You can reach our designated agent at:

• E-mail: privacy@stage.africa
• Address: 108 5th Street, Linden, Randburg, 2195
• Telephone: +27 82 657 6005

If you break any of the rules in this section we may block your access, take down what you published, or close your account. We do that to keep the site working rather than to police what people think of it.

We are not against machines reading the site. Reading it automatically is fine; what is not fine is doing so in a way that costs us money or availability, or that circumvents something we have deliberately put in the way.

The Content on This Site, and What You May Do with It

The words, diagrams, and generated images on this site are the copyright of Andries Petrus (Riaan) Burger, unless the item says otherwise. All rights in them are reserved for now. We intend to publish our own material under a permissive licence, and when we do, each item will say so.

Every article, and every photograph that is not ours, carries its own licence information: who holds the rights, what licence applies, where it came from, how to credit it, and any condition that travels with it. That information is the authority. Nothing in these terms grants you anything, and no statement anywhere on the site grants you more than the item's own licence does.

Some of what you see is not ours to license at all, and this matters more than it sounds:

• Most photographs are not ours. Where one came from somebody else, it is credited where the article shows it, and its own licence is named there. That licence governs what you may do with the photograph, and it is the thing to read.
• Where a photograph is ours, all rights in it are reserved, like anything else we made.
• Where a photograph carries an open licence, such as a Creative Commons one, you have whatever that licence gives you, directly from the photographer. We do not add conditions to it and could not if we wanted to.
• Where a photograph is licensed to us commercially, our licence does not let us pass it on. You may not extract, download, or reuse those photographs as files in their own right, whatever the article around them says.
• Articles written by other people carry their author's licence, shown with the article.
• What a member has put on their own entry is theirs, not ours. Their words, their photographs, their logo. We show it because they gave us permission to, and that permission is ours alone: it does not pass to you, and nothing on this page lets you copy a member's photograph or their description of their own business. If you want to use one, ask them.
• Glissade dance terminology is displayed here as part of the publication. Seeing it on the site does not give you the dataset behind it.
• The copyright notice in our footer covers this site as a whole. It claims nothing over a photograph or an article that carries its own licence.

"Stage Africa", "Glissade", and our logos and get-up are ours. Please do not use them in a way that suggests we endorse you or are connected with you.

What You Publish Here

If you hold an account you can put things on this site, and this section is about those. Sending us a message or an e-mail is different, and What you send us covers it.

What you can publish, once your claim to an entry is confirmed:

• Your entry in the directory. Your name or your organisation's, what you offer, where you are, how to reach you, and the rest of what an entry holds.
• Your profile. What you write about yourself or your organisation, in your own words, shown beside your entry.
• Pictures. If your entry is a person, a portrait, a headshot and a photograph of you at work. If it is an organisation, its logo.
• Albums of your own photographs, gathered into a gallery on your entry. A production, a term, a showcase, whatever the set is.
• Posts in our forum.

You must not use AI to show a real person as they were not, in a picture, a voice or a video, unless that person agreed to it, and for anybody under 18 it is their parent or guardian who agrees. A headshot on your entry must look like you do today, because a casting director calls you in on it, and you may touch it up, restyle it or change what you are wearing in it with any tool.

We read what you write before it goes on a directory page. That is how a directory stays a directory rather than a noticeboard. We may ask you to change something, we may publish part of it, and we may decline. We are not obliged to publish anything.

The forum works the other way. Once you are in, posts go up as you write them, and apart from posts in a group's private room, anyone can read them without an account, so please write as though the whole internet can see it, because it can.

What you write and photograph stays yours. We do not claim ownership of it and we are not asking you to give it up.

What we do need is permission to show it, and this is what that permission means. When you tick that a picture is yours to publish, you are giving Stage Africa permission to show it: here, in anything we build from your entry, including a website of your own that we run for you, and in the ordinary places a page gets seen, such as a search result or a link preview. It also lets us use the picture in what we publish ourselves, such as an article or an issue of our magazine, including one we sell. You are not giving it to anyone else, we do not sell the picture on its own, and we do not license it on.

You can withdraw the permission at any time. When you do we stop showing the picture on your entry and anywhere we render it from your entry, including a website we run for you. What we cannot undo is something we have already published: if the picture has appeared in an article or an issue of our magazine, that piece stays as it was published, because an archive that changes on request is not a record. You can still ask us to take it out and we will consider it the way we consider any other correction, and if the picture is of a child we will take it out.

The same permission, in the same words, covers what you write on your own entry, except that it does not reach what we publish ourselves. It runs for as long as you leave the material here, and it ends when you withdraw it or take the material down.

A forum post works differently, and it is the one thing here that stops being only yours the moment you post it. The words stay yours and we claim no ownership of them. What we keep is permission to go on showing that post where you made it, in the thread it belongs to, and that permission does not end when you close your account. It has to work that way. Once somebody has replied to you, taking your post away takes their reply out of sense, and half a conversation is worse for everybody than a whole one.

What you can always do is take your name off your posts. Ask us and we will detach them from your account. The name on each post, and on every quote of it in somebody else' reply, becomes an anonymous one, and the conversation itself keeps working. When you close your account on the site, we ask you whether your name stays on them, and if you write to us to close it, tell us.

Taking your name off changes the name on a post and never what it says. If you wrote your own name in a post, it stays there. It also cannot be undone. If you go on using the forum, or come back to it later, you start again with a new forum account, and your old posts keep the anonymous name.

That is not the whole of what you can ask for. Where a post is wrong about you, out of date, excessive, or should never have been there, the law gives you more than a name change, and our privacy notice says how to ask and what we have to do about it.

We may take something down. We do that where it breaks these terms, where somebody tells us it infringes their rights and we think they are probably right, where it is a photograph we have been asked to remove, or where we are required to. We will tell you what came down and why. If you think we got it wrong, say so and we will look again.

Nothing here is a promise to keep your material online. We may stop offering a feature, and we may close the site. If we do, we will give you reasonable notice and a way to take your own material with you.

Photographs of Other People

Most photographs on this site are of people, and a photograph is usually not the property of the person in it. It belongs to whoever took it. So when you upload one we ask you three things: one about every picture, and two you give once.

The question we ask beside each picture is whether it is yours to publish. You answer that one for each picture separately and we mean it separately: three pictures usually have three photographers, so one answer cannot stand for all three. We will not publish a picture whose question you have not answered, and we keep your answer with the date and your name against it.

The other two you give once, with your first photograph, and they hold for it and everything you upload after it:

• That anyone who can be recognised in a photograph of yours has agreed to it appearing here. We take your word for it and do not ask for a signed release.
• That where somebody in one is under 18, their parent or guardian has agreed.

We ask those two once, and never again for a picture. Every photograph of a person you upload from then on carries that date. Each version of these terms stays readable at https://www.stage.africa/terms with the dates it applied, so what you undertook is what they said on the day you gave them.

The second is the one the law is strictest about. A child's personal information is protected more strictly than an adult's, and a photograph of an identifiable child is their personal information. Their parent or guardian is the one who agrees, and we are not in the room when it is asked for. You are. So we take a photograph of a child on your word that the person who can agree has agreed.

If you cannot say both, do not upload it. There is no penalty for that and we would far rather have a smaller gallery.

We are not checking any of it. We cannot: we do not know who is in your photographs, who took them, or who their parents are. What we record is your answer about each picture, the day you gave the other two, and that date on every photograph of a person you have uploaded since. None of it records who agreed, or which child, or when. It records what you undertook and the day you undertook it, and that is what we will produce if anybody asks. If something you have told us turns out not to be true, that is between you and the person affected, and we will take the photograph down.

Anybody in a photograph can ask us to remove it, and so can a parent or guardian on a child's behalf. Write to privacy@stage.africa, tell us which picture, and you do not have to explain why. We will take it down while we work out where it came from rather than after.

If a parent or guardian asks us to remove a photograph of a child, we take it down within two working days and tell them when it is done. We do not ask them to prove anything first.

Removing a photograph here removes it from anywhere we are showing it, including a website we run for a member. It does not reach copies other people have already made, which is the same limit that applies to anything published anywhere.

What You Send Us

This section is about writing to us rather than publishing here. If you hold an account and are putting something on your own entry, What you publish here covers it.

You can send us a contact-form message, a newsletter sign-up, or an e-mail. You do not need an account for any of them.

What you write to us stays yours. We use it to answer you and for nothing else, and our privacy notice says how long we keep it.

If you send us something you would like published, please say so, and we will come back to you. Sending it does not give us permission to publish it, and we do not treat it as if it had. That is deliberate, and it is the difference between writing to us and uploading to your own entry: a member uploading a picture has been asked a question and has answered it, and somebody attaching a photograph to an e-mail has not.

We are not able to accept unsolicited photographs of identifiable people at all, because the permission needed for that is the photographer's and the subject's, not the sender's. If you have a photograph you think belongs on this site, write and tell us about it rather than sending it.

If you write to us about a listing, an article, or anything else we have published, we are glad to hear from you and our corrections page says how that works. Writing to us about your own entry is not the same as claiming it: a claim gives you an account and the ability to edit, and it is a separate thing you have to ask for.

What the Site Is, and What It Is Not

This site is a publication. What we write is editorial: reporting, opinion, explanation, and reference.

It is not instruction, and it is not professional advice. Dance, circus, and the other kinds of movement we write about are physical activities, and they carry a risk of injury, which can be serious. Nothing here is a substitute for learning from a qualified teacher in a room, and nothing here is medical advice. If you are working on technique, or coming back from an injury, or unsure whether something is safe for you, ask a teacher or a health professional rather than an article.

That matters enough to say plainly rather than leave implied. We do not know your body, your training, your injuries, or the room you are standing in, and we cannot see what you do with anything you read here. So if you put into practice something you read on this site, you do that on your own judgement and at your own risk, and you accept that risk yourself. Where you are unsure, the answer is a teacher who can watch you, not a paragraph that cannot.

We take care with what we publish and we correct what we get wrong. If we have written about you, listed you in our directory, or published anything you believe is wrong, tell us: our corrections page says how, who handles it, and how long we take, and it covers a directory entry the same way it covers an article. We would rather hear from you than from your lawyer.

Even so, articles and listings go out of date, and the dance terminology we display is a reference rather than a ruling: usage differs between traditions, between countries, and between studios in the same street.

Our directory is mostly our own work. We compile each entry from public sources, so the company, venue, or person it describes has usually had no part in writing it and has not checked it. Where that is so, the words in an entry are ours, and if they are wrong they are ours to put right.

Some entries are no longer only ours. A member who has claimed their entry writes their own profile and adds their own pictures, which appear beside what we compiled. They cannot edit our part of it: if something we wrote about them is wrong, they ask us to change it the same way anybody else would, and our corrections page is the route. We read what a member writes before it appears, but we are publishing their account of themselves rather than our own, and where an entry holds both it says which words are whose. If a member has said something about their own business that is wrong, tell us and we will take it up with them.

What a listed party does is theirs either way, and listing them is not a recommendation, an endorsement, or a check that they are any good. Who we include is an editorial choice and an incomplete one, so leaving somebody out says nothing about them.

Disclaimers and Limits on Liability

We provide the site "as is". Beyond what the law requires, we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or fit for a particular purpose.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of the site. Nothing in these terms limits any liability that cannot be limited by law, including your mandatory rights as a consumer.

Availability, and Blocking Access

We publish when we publish. There is no guarantee that the site will be available, and we may change it, move things, or take material down without telling you first. We may stop publishing altogether.

We may block access from an address or a client that is doing any of the things the acceptable-use section asks you not to do. If we have blocked you and you think we should not have, write to us at privacy@stage.africa and we will look at it.

Nothing here is a subscription and nothing is owed to you as a reader, which is also why you owe us nothing for reading.

Governing Law and Disputes

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa, and the South African courts have jurisdiction over any dispute about them.

This does not take away the protection of the mandatory consumer and data-protection laws of the country where you live. Where those laws give you rights, or a place to bring a claim, that these terms cannot override, they continue to apply to you.

Changes to These Terms

We may change these terms as the site changes and as the law changes. The version that applies is on this page, with the date it took effect. When a new version is coming, this page shows it as well, with the date it applies from. Every earlier version stays reachable from this page, with the dates it applied.

When you make an account, we ask you to accept these terms, and we keep the date you did. If your account was made without that question, we ask the next time you sign in. With the dated versions, that date shows which terms you accepted.

When we make a change that matters to you, we say so on this page and e-mail every member with what changed and the date it applies from, which is at least 14 days after the e-mail unless the law needs the change sooner. You can close your account at any time, and if you close it before that date, the change never applies to you. If you carry on using your account after that date, you have accepted the change. If you read the site without an account, the version in force on the day you read it applies to you.

If a change ever needs your agreement, we will ask you for it directly and wait for your answer.

Version 1.1, in effect from 22 September 2026 until 1 October 2026.