Acts of Love Under a Southern Moon… PMB!
We are slowly getting our Represent feelers out to the other provinces as the word spreads… Here we even feature the Durban-based Flatfoot dance company that will be showing their latest piece in Maritzburg! Ah Maritzburg… you bad bad town. Performers make sure you go straight back to Durban afterwards… that town can suck you in!
Our girl Naz gives us the shakedown:
Wh…
ere do you begin to write about something that touches you and moves you in so many different ways? Where do you begin to put into words that surge of emotion you feel when you watch a dance so beautiful, so true, and so close to home? This is exactly my dilemma as I sit here, trying to recount my experience of watching the latest creation of the Flatfoot Dance Company last night.
Acts of Love Under a Southern Moon was inspired by choreographer Llianne Loots’ personal journey to the Karoo and her own need “to find a Mecca ” a spiritual East!. As the journey unfolds it becomes immediately recognisable to each individual as his own journey, for we all search for this place (externally and internally) that we can call home. Thus it is a piece about love for each other, love for oneself, and love for the earth – unconditional love. This is particularly relevant to us as South Africans, learning to love our home country, despite a history characterised by hatred, and only when we can learn to do this, can we truly survive.
In true Flatfoot style, the production was an intricate collaboration of video, poetry and contemporary dance that was both familiar yet refreshing. The show featured some old faces such as award-winning Musa Hlatswayo and Marise Kyd, but also boasted the newest Flatfoot talents, Lenin Shabala and Sizwe Zulu who performed a delicate, and moving duet. I was particularly impressed by Caroline Van Wyk, a powerful, confident dancer whose award is long-overdue. The three poets were without a doubt stars of the show in their own right. Quincy Fynn of The Big Idea, Ian Robinson and Nathan Redpath of Illuminating Shadows each performed original texts, which were bold expressions of love, and which questioned the lost passion in South Africans today.
Probably one of the best works I have yet seen by Llianne Loots’ Flatfoot Dance Company and I have no doubt that from here on they will be soaring to the moon and beyond. Acts of Love Under a Southern Moon is about a personal journey and yet can be true to the spiritual search of every South African, or for that matter every human being, carrying the message that “this earth holds a place for all of us. If nothing else, it will leave you with a sense of hope that the home you spend your life searching for is indeed within reach. But my words cannot possibly do it justice. You have to see it for yourself!
Acts of Love Under A Southern Moon is showing at the Hexagon in Pietermaritzburg from the 19 – 21 May 2005. The Flatfoot Dance Company will also be presenting a brand new work at Jomba in August this year.
—–
