(Pic: Sifiso Khumalo and Nobuhle Khawula)Flatfoot Dance Company premiers new season of work at Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre.
Durban’s acclaimed Flatfoot Dance Company premiers its new season of work, Bloodlines, at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre from September 30. Partnering up once again choreographically are Durban’s David Gouldie and Lliane Loots who linked up in 2007 to create a season of work called Premonitions for Flatfoot. Both these works jointly won the prestigious 2007 KZN DanceLink award for choreography, sealing this partnership as both creatively forceful and groundbreaking. With the highly skilled six dancers of Flatfoot, the dynamic of Gouldie/Loots duo have pushed their own boundaries as South African dance makers - each creating a new full length dance work that speaks to the intricate and poetic title of the season – “bloodlines”.
David Gouldie’s work, Bloodlines Part 1, opens the season and combines his highly theatrical sense of staging with the use of classical line and speed. As he says, “this work is a response to a few concepts that have been rattling through my brain this last while and is everything Durban, which, I suppose, is deeply my bloodline! Durban design, concept, composition, costumes design, music design and the energy between myself and the dancers”. Combining clinical dictionary definitions of ‘blood’ (specialised bodily fluid that delivers necessary substance to the body’s cells) with the geometrical patterns of mathematics (the science and study of quantity, structure, space, and change), Gouldie’s work is a desperate search to feel the emotions in all of the blood and clinical mathematics of reason and deduction. Blood, and the politics of blood is, after all, life?
Lliane Loots’s work, Bloodlines Part 2, delves head-first and uncompromisingly into a political dreamscape that looks into questions of home, belonging and what it means to be a contemporary African. Images of bloodlines that encompass African refugees in South Africa, itinerant African people searching for a home, xenophobia, and Loots’s own ironic look at whiteness and her Afrikaner roots, is presented in a dance work that offers very little narrative but rather the dreams and nightmares of the present. Collaborating with long-time friend and internationally acclaimed poet Ewok (Iain Robinson), Loots finds a way to thread the spoken work and Ewok’s own inimitable performance style into a dance theatre work that begins to redefine a genre. Also collaborating once again with Loots, is Durban filmmaker Karen Logan whose poetic images further layer a work that is sure to get a response from the audience.
As Loots has said, “I make theatre and dance that brings the people I work with along with me - be this the dancers who actively are part of the creative process, or the poet or the filmmaker. In a strange way, we have all been feeling quite profoundly about these kinds of bloodlines that make us African – we might not all agree but we have raised the often-heated discussions; and this is what art should do after all?”
Bloodlines runs at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre from September 30 to October 3 with performances at 19h30 and a further performance on October 4 at 15h00. Running time is 1hour 40 minutes with a 15 minute interval. Tickets R65 (R45 students, scholars and pensioners or block booking of more than 10 tickets). Booking through Computicket
Watch out for “Cheap Thursday” on October 1 when all tickets are set at R40. This will also include a question and answer session after the show with the two choreographers (David Gouldie and Lliane Loots) hosted by acclaimed Johannesburg-based theatre and dance journalist Adrienne Sichel - a rare opportunity to hear the insights of Sichel and to listen to the choreographers talk about their work.
Flatfoot Dance Company acknowledges the financial support of The National Arts Council of South Africa and HIVOS towards the realisation of its creative and educational dance work.
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