DURBAN’S Flatfoot Dance Company is one of four companies invited by the National Arts Council of South Africa to represent South Africa in Senegal at the prestigious Goree Island Diaspora Festival at the end of this month. Flatfoot will be presenting a double bill (titled “Southern Exposure”) by choreographer and artistic director, Lliane Loots.
Over 2016, Loots has presented two linked dance works that have dealt with hard-hitting themes around displacement, migrations and refugees. The first titled, Homeland (security) was presented in April at the Sneddon Theatre and looks into issues of identity from the pain of the global refugee crisis that sees millions of people forced to leave or evacuated their homes due to war, and political and social disasters.
In this piece, Loots and the Flatfoot dancers respond to false notion of belonging to a nation state and of feeling safe at ‘home’. With a deep resonance towards the pain of South Africa’s own xenophobia and continued racism, Loots’s production begins to claim back the internal safety of a resistant (dancing) self that seeks community.
The second work, Migrations (at the feet of Kali), sees Flatfoot collaborate with ewok Robinson and classical Indian Kathak dancer Manesh Maharaj. This dance theatre works is a physical journey into the heart of colonial and post-colonial rememberings around the violent movements and migrations of people.
Loots said, “We are thrilled to be going. Not only to share our work on our own continent but to take dance work that means something to us and to the lives of African bodies that must speak.”
