Fragile collaboration for Durban dance gurus

FLATFOOT Dance Company kicks of its 11th year on stage with a season of new dance works to lure, cajole, amuse and entertain audiences.

Entitled Fragile, this dance season, which takes place from 12 to 15 March at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre, reunites long time choreographic partners David Gouldie and Lliane Loots. Both of them have enjoyed two previous joint seasons together, the first of which saw them being awarded the prestigious KZN DanceLink award for choreography for Premonitions.

While Gouldie and Loots have divergent choreographic styles and roots, the two have found a working synergy that speaks of mutual respect and a deep understanding of the need to  honour the power of the South African dancing body to tell stories. Fragile offers a contemplative and highly charged season of new dance theatre. With 20 years of democracy being celebrated, Gouldie and Loots, and the incomparable talent of the six resident Flatfoot dancers, Sifiso Khumalo, Tshediso Kabulu, Sifiso Majola, Jabu Siphika, Julia Wilson and Zinhle Nzama, begin to pick apart any grand images of rainbows and dive fearlessly into the personal and political waters of our 20 years of good dreams and painful nightmares.

Gouldie’s dance theatre work is unabashedly entitled “dusting off my history”. In a flourish of ironic and, at times, self-deprecating humour, Gouldie looks back to his own South African ballet and dance history. He has the Flatfoot dancers embellishing all of his classical ballet history to the point of intense comedy, and then it takes a turn and the audience, are left breathless as they glimpse a fragile and wounded heart trying so hard to find home.

Lliane Loots, artistic director and resident choreographer to Flatfoot, offers a slightly risky political dance theatre. Her work has toured the world where her bold choreographic voice and vision has seen her and the company receive numerous international and local awards and commissions. For this season, Loots has created a work called “the inheritance of loss” and is a profound reflection of her own, and Flatfoot’s, history. The show features small fragmented moments of personal and political history and memory, that, when weaved together on the stage, offers a ruminating internal monologue.

Shows are at 7.30pm each evening and a 3pm matinee on Sunday 16 March. Booking is open at Computicket and tickets cost between R60 and R85.