Breaking conventions, saluting heritage

This is no ordinary year for South African contemporary theatre dance. No, I’m not referring to the funding carnage and impending annihilation being caused by ignorant politicians and callous bureaucrats, but the important milestones various professional dance companies and institutions celebrate this year.

In Cape Town, Jazzart Dance Theatre is marking its 40th year. In Joburg, Moving into Dance Mophatong turns 35. In Grahamstown, the First Physical Theatre company reaches its second decade. Last month Dance Umbrella toasted 25 years of nurturing home-grown contemporary choreography and performance across cultural and racial divides. And the UCT School of Dance is in its 79th year of producing teachers, performers, choreographers and dance academics.

On March 13, at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre in Durban, the Flatfoot Dance Company began celebrating a special slice of our heritage – its 10th anniversary as a professional dance company – with the double-bill sombrely titled Last Thoughts.

Flatfoot, taking its title from the (racist) preconception that black dancers could never be professional dancers because their feet were too flat, as well as echoing the African dancer’s connection with the earth, has, mainly because of National Arts Council (NAC) company funding, redefined what a dance company can be in a socio-political and community context.

Starting out as a training initiative in 1994, as an extension of the Drama and Performance Studies Programme with newly appointed dance lecturer Lliane Loots at the University of Natal, Flatfoot has gradually left its imprint on greater Durban – from Umlazi and Wentworth to KwaMashu and beyond up to the Mozambican border.

Its youth development programmes, focusing on gender violence, HIV education and life skills, has evolved this year into the Advanced Development Programme catering for 12 teenagers (16 years old and older) who have been with Flatfoot for nine years and aspire to be professional dancers.

The establishment of the Jomba! Contemporary Dance Experience in 2008 provided a platform for showcasing performance and choreography not only of the city and region, but nationally and internationally. Historic conferences also brainstormed African dance pedagogy and questioned contemporary dance on the continent.

The first tranche of NAC funding in 2004 set the ball rolling, not only in developing a company style, now widely recognised as Ngidansa iFlatfoot, but a repertoire of choreographic works, starting with The Orion Project, which reflect the cultural, historical and political roots of the fulltime company and its audiences.

From the start significant collaborators have included slam poet Iain “Ewok” Robinson, who has written and performed material for the Flatfoot Dance Company, peaking in Last Thoughts, the final eponymous piece on the programme which opened with the premiere of Sifiso Kweyama’s commissioned Ngichaze/Define Me for the six company members.

Another strand of Flatfoot’s remarkable legacy was evident in guest artists Preston “Kayzo” Kid and Byrone “Bizzo” Tifflin, world champion break dancers who started out with Ewok and co’s lifecheck programme when they were 12 and dance training with Flatfoot in 2006.

The birthday evening was preceded by one of Loots’s speeches delivered “on the edge of the rim of a grave”. She referred to the stigma of African dancers seen to have dropped arches and white South African dancers who are not regarded as African – “all of this historical racism and fascism on bodies that did not (and do not) fit narrow definitions of European standards of perfection”.

The ensuing choreography astutely challenged, and transcended, these assumptions.

Regular guest choreographer Kweyama (from Moving Into Dance Mophatong) has created a reflective, emotionally charged, contempo-rary love letter for the Flatfoot and South African dancer. The rhythmic imagery and thoughtful structure subtly unleashes tinctures of traditional Zulu dance lyrically melded with individual expression revealed in silence, or to the instrumental experimentation of Venetian Snares (Canadian musician).

Loots’s Last Thoughts is a praise poem honouring the dancing, thinking, feeling, traumatised, South African body. Ewok, Flatfoot’s beat Bard, and the B-Boyz are seamlessly integrated into these verbal and physical testimonies. This transfusion of crosspollinated dance techniques infused with inventive aesthetics could be Flatfoot Dance Company’s epitaph, but ideally it will be just another notch in an invaluable canon.

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