28 March - 1 April 2012
Contemporary Dance

SOUTH-SOUTH is the meeting of two formidable women choreographers both of whom are carving out a space as intelligent, cutting edge and innovative contemporary dance makers. Liz Lea travels to Durban from Canberra Dance Theatre in Australia and joins Durban’s provocative dance theatre maker, Lliane Loots. SOUTH-SOUTH is a season which sees these two dance makers join together to premier new works created for the 6 resident Flatfoot Dance Company dancers, and for Lea’s work the inclusion of a further 4 guest Durban dancer; Jarryd Watson, Pravika Nandkishore, Zinhle Nzama and Leagan Pffifer.

In a visual feast that celebrates contemporary dance making at its most beautiful, both Lea and Loots work alongside one another to not only challenge the dancers, but to afford Durban audiences a really pioneering dance theatre experience.

Lea is a performer and choreographer trained at the London Contemporary Dance School and Akademi in London and Darpana Academy in India. She is fast developing an international reputation for her ground-breaking cross cultural explorations of the meeting of classical Indian dance and martial arts, within the framework of contemporary dance making. She is presently working as the Artistic Director of Canberra Dance Theatre. She is a choreographer and dancer whose work is performed globally and she is delighted to find herself in South Africa as the result of an invitation by KZN DanceLink. Having lived some of her younger life in Malawi, Lea says she feels a little like ‘coming home’ when she stepped off the plane.

Lea is busy putting the Flatfoot dancers through their paces at the moment and is delighted by what she calls, “an openness and a sense of strength and precision in their technique”. Her cross cultural style which really challenges the notions of fusion is sure to delight both classical and contemporary audiences.

Loots’s new work, “mapping nostalgia” is her second collaboration with veteran maskanda musician Madala Kunene, and they are joined by long-time collaborator to Flatfoot, Mandla Matsha. Loots says that “working with live musicians who create and score in the studio as you are imagining and creating the choreography is a dream come true for any choreographer”.

Loots is well known for her award winning dance theatre landscapes in which her almost cinematic eye layers narrative upon narrative that allows the eye to wander over the dreams – and sometimes nightmares – of what it means to be South African. “mapping nostalgia” is a sometimes brutal look into the remembrances of what was hoped for but that never was, of the sometimes really beautiful longing for an imagined home; and all of this through the bodies of the six Flatfoot dancers whose own lives and stories have become part of this dance work.

Loots says, “all contemporary theatre travels to dark and dangerous places, all of it masked in beauty. Sometimes this beauty is real and then our heart sings, and sometimes this beauty is only an idea we once had for a better future, but always, in dance, we come back to the body; a surface tension for both violence and , maybe, redemption – this is what “mapping nostalgia” is about”.

SOUTH-SOUTH offers two innovative choreographic voices speaking physical truths that negotiate crossing cultures and crossing divides – not to be missed!

DATES : 28 – 31 March @ 7.30pm
1 April @ 3pm

TICKET PRICES:
R65.00 (adults)
R45.00 (student/scholar/pensioners)
CHEAP THURSDAY: all tickets R45

SOUTH-SOUTH specifically has been made possible by support from the National Arts Council of South Africa, the Australian High Commission, National Lotteries Distribution Trust Fund and KZN DanceLink. Flatfoot Dance Company’s work is also supported by the National Arts Council of South Africa, HIVOS, BASA and ncpalcohols.