Celebrating its 21st birthday, Durban's award-winning FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY presents a short season of contemporary dance that promises to nourish and enrich, at The Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre on 10 and 11 May.
Titled JOURNEY, the season features two new works, one by resident choreography and artistic director, Lliane Loots, and a another by special guest from Madagascar, Gaby Saranouffi. The season not only celebrates the 21-year journey of getting to this milestone, but it also delves into the head and heart of what it means to be alive at this point in history.
Saranouffi's SORITRA (traces) opens the evening in a fast-paced journey of self in a search for “traces of where we come from and where we are going.” Inspired by a Malagasy indigenous abstract strategy board game called “diam-panorona”, the movement of stones on a board, horizontally, vertically, and diagonally are intriguingly replicated in a contemporary dance formation with bold athletic movements. Interestingly this work is now in its own 21st-year as Saranouffi has shared it in many spaces and places. She says, “I love letting it breathe new life when new dancer step in and learn it and make it their own. This is a work about the translation of culture, history and memory from one body to another and I am so excited to give it now to FLATFOOT on their 21st birthday.”
Loots's premieres a new work for FLATFOOT, titled the salt on your skin, and begins to journey to the cities (or sites?) of the interior in an often painful, always beautiful, look at intimacy. Referencing sweat and skin, and other acts of love and labour that make up the everyday of our lives, this work is co-created with the six resident FLATFOOT dancers (Sifiso Khumalo, Jabu Siphika, Zinhle Nzama, Ndumiso Dube and Siseko Duba). Drawing on deeply personal stories of love, loss, and ultimately hope, the salt on your skin sees Loots once again using dance to delve into the small stories to imagine; and thus change the bigger narrative that hold our lives. Loots says, “we often mistake intimacy as being only about romance and sex, and while this is also true, the intimacies of raising children, being a mother or father, of mourning lost family and friends, of waking up each day to come to work, of sweating in the studio as we dance through this all, is a shared intimacy that the FLATFOOT dancers have given me. This work, on our 21st birthday, is for the six dancers – it is a love song we created together”.
the salt on your skin is made up of four sections that traverse a landscape of intimacies, loss, love, shame, and hope. With subtle and evocative lighting by Wesley Maherry, this is a surprisingly gentle dance work given the voracity and intimacy of the unfolding stories.
JOURNEY is at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre for only 3 performances, 10 May @ 7pm, 11 May @ 2.30pm, and 11 May @ 7pm. Tickets cost R120 (R85 for pensioners, students, scholars and block bookings of 10 or more).
Booking via COMPUTICKET: https://computicket.com/event/journey/6688047
This season is made possible through a special partnership with the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre.
Thanks to Itrotra Art X Connection NPC
Picture here: Zinhle Nzama and Siseko Duba
Photo by Val Adamson
Supplied.