(Tshediso Kabulu and Julia Wilson)Flatfoot Dance Company heads off to the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown from June 28 to July 8.
Having scooped one of the prestigious Ovation Awards at the 2011 festival for Loots’s acclaimed Bhakti, Flatfoot Dance Company return to Grahamstown this year on an invitation to the Arena Platform with a forceful season of dance theatre.
Called Southern Exposure, this programme features two of Loots’s most recent dance works back to back and is, in many ways, a tribute to the strongly gendered voice of Loots as one of South Africa’s foremost critical female dance voices in choreography. It also showcases the now nine-year -old KZN-based Flatfoot Dance Company to sublime perfection. The six resident dancers are fearless in journeying with Loots into hazardous social and political terrain where they quite literally put their bodies on the line. This is dance theatre at its most visceral!
Southern Exposure begins with Loots’s 2011 solo work SKIN performed by newcomer to the company, and recent winner of the 2012 KZN DanceLink award for best female dancers, Lerato Lipere. Having originally premiered at the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Festival, this work generated some measure of controversy.
A black half-naked young woman finds herself in a half-lit room, stripped and vulnerable. It could be a prison cell anywhere in post-colonial Africa. This body, this ‘skin’, becomes the embodiment of hurt and violence done to women; from the Swazi reed dances, where hundreds of young female virgins, almost naked, pay cultural homage to a King, to the splitting open of the, almost naked, bodies of sisters who do not fit in, the audience is left asking what clothes should we - as women - begin to choose to cover our skin? The work also features video installations by Karen Logan and a soundscape created by Liam Magner. Stravinsky’s Sacre and the Shembe horn meet in an African Rites of Spring.
The second work is Loots’s 2012 mapping nostalgia and is her second collaboration with veteran maskanda musician Madala Kunene, and they are joined by long-time collaborator to Flatfoot, Mandla Matsha. Loots says that “working with live musicians who create and score in the studio as you are imagining and creating the choreography is a dream come true for any choreographer”.
Loots is well-known for her award-winning dance theatre landscapes in which her almost cinematic eye layers narrative upon narrative that allows the eye to wander over the dreams – and sometimes nightmares – of what it means to be South African. “mapping nostalgia” is a sometimes brutal look into the remembrances of what was hoped for but that never was, of the sometimes really beautiful longing for an imagined home; and all of this through the bodies of the six Flatfoot dancers (Sifiso Khumalo, Tshediso Kabulu, Sifiso Majola, Julia Wilson, Lerato Lipere and Zinhle Nzama) whose own lives and stories have become part of this dance work. At its heart, this is also a dance work that negotiates a historical lineage and is - in some measure - the story of Ingrid Jonker; a white South African Afrikaner woman artist who also struggled to find a place of belonging.
Loots says: “All contemporary dance theatre travels to dark and dangerous places, all of it masked in beauty. Sometimes this beauty is real and then our heart sings, and sometimes this beauty is only an idea we once had for a better future, but always, in dance, we come back to the body; a surface tension for both violence and, maybe, redemption – this is what mapping nostalgia is about”.
Flatfoot Dance Company performs Southern Exposure at the Centenary Hall at the NAF on July 1 at 12h30, July 2 at 12 noon and 20h00, and July 3 at 12noon.
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