UKZN Dance Lecturer Invited to 2016 National Arts Festival

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UKZN’s Dance Lecturer in the Drama and Performance Studies Programme in the School of Arts, Ms Lliane Loots, was awarded one of only four Grahamstown National Arts Festival (NAF) dance-related grants to present her choreographic work at the 2016 Festival.

The Festival is one of the country’s most prestigious arts and culture platforms with intense competition for the grants.

Loots’s 2015 dance theatre work, days like these, created with the FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY, won the attention of the NAF arts committee due to its radical and ground-breaking interchange between dance, film, light and the spoken word.

Loots says days like these offers a tender dance journey into the sacred world of everyday memories. ‘I used verbatim theatre and documentary style theatre-making methods to create the work and it is, in the end, a type of personal zeitgeist that encounters the politics of the everyday of being a South African, with all our memories and history.’

Loots is overwhelmed and delighted by the invite: ‘It is a wonderful national recognition of my dance-making and creative work and the work of the FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY.  It remains deeply humbling to be able to share this work on a larger artistic platform.’

Loots and the FLATFOOT company travel to Grahamstown on Monday, 27 June to set up the show for performances on Thursday, 30 June (18h00) and Friday, 1 July (14h00 and 18h00).

While in Grahamstown, Loots will present a paper at the Arterial Network’s Conference on: “Women, Leadership and the Arts in Africa”.

Melissa Mungroo