Days like these brings dance theatre to life
Flatfoot Dance Company presents Days like these at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre.
DURBAN’S Flatfoot Dance Company begins its 12th year in 2015 with the performance, Days like these, which has a one week run at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre from 25 to 29 March.
Always looking for new challenges, award-winning Durban based choreographer, Lliane Loots has delved into the theatre making methodologies of Verbatim Theatre to create Days like these. Verbatim theatre, sometimes referred to as Documentary Theatre, asks the playwright to gather live testimony and the spoken word of real people to construct the dialogue of a drama. In this way the resultant theatre work achieves a degree of authenticity and truthfulness that allows real people a voice. With a history going back to the 60s, Verbatim Theatre has a long trajectory in creating edgy political theatre where these methodologies help create social dialogue.
In Days like these, Loots has asked the six resident Flatfoot dancer and co-collaborators on this dance work, Sifiso Majola, Tshediso Kabulu, Sifiso Khumalo, Jabu Siphika, Julia Wilson and Zinhle Nzama, to go even deeper into this physical and spoken word storytelling and after a two week intensive and deeply personal workshop process around memory gathering, Loots then only set out to create the choreography around what she calls “a dance theatre work that takes everyday memories and begins to celebrate the sacred of what we all might feel is the commonplace of our lives”.
Days like these sees Loots return to a long time artistic partnership with award winning Durban theatre and filmmaker, Karen Logan. Logan’s videoscape for Days like these, sits at the heart of the work as it was her task to capture, verbatim, the final memories and stories collected.
Days like these works with multiple projections and light, and as the images, the voices and the dancing bodies begin – in truth and vulnerability – to layer the stage space, so the remarkable magic of dance theatre starts to happen.
Bookings are open via Computicket. Ticket prices are R85 for adults, R50 for students/learners and pensioners. Block bookings of 10 or more people is also at R50 per ticket.
