Dancers create with differently abled when Flatfoot
Dance Company and INTRODANS collaborate with Downs Syndrome dancers.
Durban-based Flatfoot Dance Company and
Adriaan Luteijn from the Netherlands-based INTRODANS Dance Company, with four
dancers with Downs Syndrome, are blazing a trail for dance in South Africa,
with their performance of “Cardiac Output”
at this year’s 19th JOMBA! Contemporary Dance on September 3.
The four young adult dancers with Downs Syndrome,
Kevin Govender and Michaela Munro (both from Queensburgh), Charles Phillips
(from Westville) and Karl Hebbelmann (from Pinetown), who auditioned earlier
this year, have been working regularly over the last five months with Flatfoot
dancers Thobile Maphanga, Sifiso Khumalo, Zihle Nzama and Jabu Siphika, and
then intensely for the last three weeks with Luteijn.
‘We have been working with the Durban Downs
Syndrome Society initially to audition dancers for this work, but also to
develop a relationship with dancers who want to perform and create,” says
Lliane Loots, Artistic Director of JOMBA! and the Flatfoot Dance Company. “This
is an art project, not a therapy project. It is a project in which these
dancers have made a commitment to making a profound piece of art. A meaningful
work of art that can make a difference to us all. One that challenges the
societal norms of who has access to create and who does not. We are all deeply
excited about the work. It has been life-changing for us all and we look forward
to seeing it performed in front of an audience on Sunday.”
Choreography is by Adriaan Luteijn,
artistic manager of INTRODANS’s educational department, Introdans Interactie.
He is known for his work that explores and extends the usual expectations of
art by working with elderly dancers, autistic dancers and others in an effort
to “involve as many people as possible to the art of modern dance, not only for
people who can find their way easily to the theatre, but for those that
cannot”.
Luteijn says that professional dancers
learn so much about themselves and their artform by dancing with people who are
differently abled, and vice versa. “It is amazing to see how our guest dancers
grow stronger in their self-confidence and, of course, the audience applause
does the rest.”
The medical term “cardiac output” is used
for the amount of blood pumped through the heart per minute. The choreography
is about matters of the human heart which can influence the cardiac output. The
first version of Cardiac Output premiered
in March last year in Amsterdam.
Cardiac
Output will close this year’s JOMBA! Contemporary
Dance Experience on September 3 at 18h00 at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre,
UKZN. Tickets are available at Computicket or at the door.
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