FLATFOOT TO HOLLAND

The Flatfoot Dance Company travels to Holland to complete three-year exchange project

Fresh from a hugely successful collaboration with Dutch choreographer Daniel Renner (for the recent 2010 JOMBA! Contemporary Dance festival) and the creation of the haunting soulscapes, Flatfoot Dance Company, continue to grow their Dutch connection.

On September 14 all nine members of Flatfoot Dance Company boarded a plane to Arnhem in Holland where they will complete what has been a three-year exchange project with Introdans and, specifically, their dance education programme called Introdans Interactive.

Adriaan Luteijn, director of Introdans Interactive first came to Durban in 2008 as a special guest of the JOMBA! festival. His work in dance education and dance development for Introdans has seen him winning major international awards and he was invited to JOMBA! to be part of a workshops series of dialogues around 'growing dance and dancers'. He was so taken with the dance development work that Flatfoot Dance Company were doing that he began communicating with Lliane Loots (artistic director of Flatfoot) around a further two-year programme which would see his team of educators and dancers travel to Durban to work alongside Flatfoot in their eight development programmes in and around Durban.

In August 2009, both Flatfoot and the Introdans team spent 12 days exchanging ideas and working/teaching methods and all of this culminated in a spectacular youth dance concert in Cato Manor.

Now in 2010, Flatfoot completes the exchange but travelling to Arnhem to run workshops, seminars and classes in the various communities in South Arnhem. In a specially designed festival called Swing on South, Flatfoot will work alongside the Introdans educators and dancers to create a big gala concert that brings together various migrant and local communities in a glorious celebration of community dance.

Flatfoot will also perform a separate evening of their own performance work at the prestigious Gruitpoort Theatre in Arnhem. They will be taking a mixed programme of work that includes one of their signature works circle" created for the company in early 2010, by Sifiso E Kweyama.