CDC: keeping dance on its feet
The Cape Dance Company celebrates its 21st birthday this year, bucking the notion that a permanent dance company is a relic of the past, writes Theresa Smith
LOUISA Talbot was 13 when she joined Debbie Turner’s then Cape Youth Company. Auditions were held at the Joseph Stone Auditorium and “it was all very exciting when she decided to start the company and I really wanted to be a part of it,” she remembers.
“As a dancer, you always want to push yourself and be better and this was the perfect platform. At that stage there was such a small group of us.”
Talbot eventually joined what is now the Cape Dance Company (CDC), remaining with Turner as she moved from the Mamacos studio to the studio on Kendall Road and eventually to Tokai.
During all this moving about, Talbot made dance her career. She took to teaching dance while working with the company, eventually travelling for work.
Then she got into musical theatre and nowadays is a sought-after choreographer on musicals – most recently she worked on the Fugard Theatre’s Cabaret and West Side Story – but CDC has always been home.
Having met many different dancers around the world, Talbot thinks South African dancers’ passion makes up for the greater technique displayed by dancers who start at an earlier age and have classes every day for years.
“It’s because the dancers here have to really fight for it, that’s why they are so passionate.
“Dance is as much a mental thing as a physical thing. It’s also about the confidence and trusting yourself to do it, so dance teaches you a lot about yourself.
“The greatest thing is to push through because you find something beautiful,” said Talbot.
One of the best things about working with the CDC for her has been the exposure to the various choreographers with their vastly different styles and temperaments.
“I know when I come back here, something exciting will be happening,” she said.
While she has worked with everyone from Alfred Hinkel to Bradley Shelver, her favourite piece will always be the pas de deux from David Krugel’s Nature of Being: “Dancing with Grant van Ster… you only find one partner like that in your life,” said Talbot
Turner says she set up the CDC as a contract-based company knowing she would never be able to sustain a full-time company. But she was determined to give local dancers a space where they would have to learn to be better all the time.
The Cape Academy of Performing Arts is her business, but the CDC is her passion. Still, the two are linked since contracted dancers are encouraged to drop in for regular classes.
While she seeks out a variety of choreographers, sometimes Turner also finds work that she knows will push the CDC to another level, like Enemy Behind the Gates six years ago, or now A Thousand Shepherds which she first saw two years ago in Wolverhampton, UK.
“I found myself quite affected by how the dancers were making me feel. You go in with an expectation of the technique, but you don’t always expect to be really moved at a deeply visceral level.
“Another part of me sitting in that auditorium was hearing a strong flamenco, rhythmic influence in Jose’s work, because that is part of his root. Carolyn Holden had passed away about eight months before that and we were close friends and young dancers together, so obviously that touched a bit of a nerve.
“Sitting there listening to the soundtrack and trying to analyse what was in front of me, thinking, ‘that’s a flamenco rhythm’ and then 15 seconds later, ‘no, that’s an African rhythm’, I had this conversation going on inside my head about what I was watching. I couldn’t put it in a box and it was so patently obvious that this was the most successful fusion of a number of dance languages that I had ever seen,” explained Turner.
“I sat there thinking, ‘my company can do this, it will be a huge stretch because it will take them out of their comfort zone, but this is a place I need to take them because it will extend them as artists.”