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Flatfoot Dance Company offers first dance festival
Durban's Flatfoot Dance Company is offering its first Flatfoot Access Dance Festival later this month.
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Three new works created by Flatfoot will be showcased celebrating the power of dance to transcend narrow definitions of who can dance.
Artistic director, Dr. Lliane Loots said, “[Our approach to community dance development is] a dance philosophy and practice we refer to as ‘living democracy’ where we find ways to make dance accessible to all no matter physical or intellectual ability, geography, race, gender and any other intersectional category around identity”.
The first work offered at the festival is Loots’s collaboration with the dancers called Same Difference which premiered to standing ovations at Sibikwa’s Body Moves Festival in Johannesburg in October 2022.
Loots says, “Same Difference is an idiomatic phrase often used in English that indicates that two things are not really different in any important way. This was the starting point for creating a dance work that plots the meetings and partings of a group of eight South African dancers who journey into the way of seeing one another”.
The second work on offer, sees Flatfoot partnering with guest choreographer from Chicago, Sydney Erlikh, who has come to Durban to share integrated dance practices with Flatfoot. Erlikh is an artist, educator and doctoral candidate in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Erlikh said, “In a world where safety is a concern, those who guide you become a shield you wear on your heart. We all came together here in Durban as a disability community to share knowledge and culture. This dance work - our dance work - is a score that will never be the same. Through it, we share our vulnerability and create safety for one another. The dance piece asks where you find safety and who has been a shield for your heart”.
The final work on the programme is a collaboration between Loots, Flatfoot and Julia Pitt, a dancer living with cerebral palsy. Pitt has always considered herself a dancer and has literally watched every local performance Flatfoot has ever done. A chance meeting started a working process in February of 2022, and this festival offers Pitt’s first public performance with the company. Loots has worked collaboratively with Pitt and Flatfoot’s Jabu Siphika and Zinhle Nzama to create an intimated and moving trio called Perpetual Motion.
Tickets are R50. Seating is limited so booking is essential at flatfootdancecompany@gmail.com.
Pre-booked tickets can be collected at venue, Courtyard Theatre, Durban University of Technology, from 45mins before the start of the show on 25 November at 6.30pm.
