FLATFOOT TRAVELS TO ZIMBABWE

Flatfoot Dance Company’s Siyakhula Dance Project (Kwamashu) has headed off to Chipawo Youth Theatre in Harare for a 10-day exchange programme.

Flatfoot Dance Company, KZN’s leading award winning African contemporary dance company, is also well known for the enormous amount of dance education and development work that it has been doing over the last eight years. This dance education work covers eight projects in both rural and urban KZN and on January 10, 12 young project participants from KwaMashu travelled to Harare to be part of a youth dance and theatre exchange between Flatfoot and Chipawo.

Chipawo began in Zimbabwe in 1989 and continues to offer arts education that has garnered it an international reputation in dealing with children’s rights through theatre and arts education. Flatfoot Dance Company is an ideal partner having spent the last eight years using dance education and training as a type of intervention methodology around teaching KZN youth about gender, environment and children’s rights.

This specific exchange, a first for both companies, is a specially focused programme that deals with combating xenophobia and is aimed at working on creating tolerance and understanding, through arts education, between the two neighbouring countries and the youth that are often effected by violence and intolerance.

Flatfoot dancers and facilitators, Jabu Siphika and Magesh Ngcobo, have created a dance theatre work to premier in Harare. This work, called isiPhethu, has evolved around a month-long series of workshops with the KwaMashu youth which have dealt with issues of xenophobia. "isiPhethu" is a Zulu word which roughly means "we all drink together from the same bore-hole" and is an idiom for sharing and living together in harmony. Both Siphika and Ngcobo will also share teaching and arts education facilitation skills with the Chipawo teachers.

Artistic Director of Flatfoot, Lliane Loots, says she is, “thrilled that such a wonderful opportunity has come up for our KwaMashu-based Siyakhula Dance Project, and we are even more delighted that we will have this meeting to address the very real concerns of xenophobia is our communities – and what a profound way of doing it; to be able to dance together!”