Testing body work
IT HAS been 16 years since the Flatfoot Company first entertained Durban audiences, and it is celebrating with three new dance works.
Under the Same Sky, which runs at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre from Wednesday until April 28, features pieces by Flatfoot members Lliane Loots, Sifiso Khumalo and Jabu Siphika.
The production touches on the zeitgeist of contemporary South African identity, asking us to remember our humanity and the place that art holds in teaching resilience.
University of KwaZulu-Natal dance lecturer and artistic director of Flatfoot, Lliane Loots, said the works allowed us to take a look at where we have come from to understand who we are and who we might become.
“It’s quite a momentous time in South African history on the eve of an election and with issues around memory and history. We were all kind of amazed that we were dealing with the idea of what it meant to be a South African and what it means to live under the same sky.
“There are two female choreographers and there’s one male, two blacks and one white. So even though there are differences in our races and genders, there was a really profound sense of all of us trying to express our identity as South Africans and with that comes a lot of questioning.”
Dancing in the season are Sifiso Khumalo, Jabu Siphika, Zinhle Nzama, Sbonga Ndlovu, Ndumiso Dube, Siseko Duba and Mthoko Mkhwanazi.
Khumalo’s work Ngaphesheya (loosely translated to mean “beyond” or “over there”) is a personal journey back to his childhood in Clermont, growing up watching someone being “necklaced”.
“It had a huge and profound impact on him and the work looks back to those moments, and in a way its violence, and the child memory of it and starts to question what freedom means now in the context of that,” said Loots.
With Siphika’s latest work,
Death of a Dream, Loots said it was a duet between Siphika herself in partnership with Mthoko Mkhwanazi which focused on the personal to the political. Siphika looks at disintegrated personal relationships as a metaphor for disinterred political hopes and dreams.
Ending the programme is Loots’s piece, Unsheltered, which is more of a global picture.
“It looks to the politics of wallbuilding that our society is moving to. It obviously tackles head-on the Donald Trump Mexican border and there’s some video installations around that. What it really looks at is some of the walls we build, the kind of political walls of Brexit and Europe, the xenophobia of excluding and including people, which is also our own stories.
“And what does it mean for us individually as we seek to find stability and we are all very clear that walls don’t make us feel safe? It is critical contemporary dance for a thinking audience.
“It’s also for an audience that wants to see beautiful bodies moving in ways that really speak of what it means to be us right now, ” Loots said.
Loots recently graduated with a PhD for her research titled “Choreographies of Identity, Self and the African Dancing Body in Negotiating Contemporary Dancing Histories and Practices in KwaZuluNatal Post 1994: A Case Study of the Flatfoot Dance Company”.
“I feel like it’s a triumph for all of us in contemporary dancing where there are not many academics working in the politics of the body and because I did write it absolutely about my work with Flatfoot. I started Flatfoot in 1994, so I really wrote about my journey with the company and in understanding the kind of politics of contemporary dance within an African context.
“The first half of the PhD looks at the 23 years of evolving dance teaching methodology that decolonises. In the second half, I look at the choreographic work with them and how we negotiated exactly this crossing genders, crossing race groups and all of it was set against a larger discussion of other choreographers working in South Africa.
“It’s kind of what we call an autoethnographic, where you write about your own processes set against a larger body of work.”
Under the Same Sky runs at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre from Wednesday. Tickets are R65 to R85, available from Computicket.
There is a special performance for schools at R30 a pupil, with teachers free, on April 26 at 10.30am. Bookings for schools can only be made through Lootsl@ukzn.ac.za