EARTH LINES

Fresh from a triumphant opening of the recent prestigious 2011 Johannesburg based Dance Umbrella, Flatfoot Dance Company, return home to showcase two of their seminal repertoire dance theatre works to a home audience. Have spent the last year travelling nationally and internationally (including trips to Cameroon and Holland) Flatfoot are delighted to be back in Durban to once again be offering Durban their award winning brand of African contemporary dance theatre.

Earth Lines is a season of the two full-length dance works; the first being Sifiso E. Kweyama's work circle. Created in early 2010, it is a haunting ritual dance theatre work that is also a slightly autobiographical look at Kweyama's own rural KZN roots. This work began as an exploration of traditional values around Zulu story-telling and its place in both ancient and contemporary African society. Sitting in a circle the dancers begin to tell their stories.

The second work on the Earth Lines programme is Loots's own controversial and critically acclaimed dance theatre work Bloodlines. First performed in 2009, it is a work that 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 own Afrikaner roots, is presented in a dance work that offers very little narrative but rather the dreams and nightmares of the present.

Collaborating, in Bloodlines with long-time friend and internationally acclaimed spoken word poet ewok (Iain Robinson), Loots has found 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, has been Durban filmmaker Karen Logan whose poetic images further layer this dance theatre vision.

earth lines runs from March 23 with performances at 19h30 at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre. Bookings through Claudette Wagner on 031 260 3133 (office hours).