«When working with dancers, I ask them to empower themselves»
Interview with Robyn Orlin
For some people, dance can be thought-provoking and exhilarating, often carving out novel social relations. The South African dancer and choreographer Robyn Orlin slices through discomfort by working through South African apartheid and childhood memories. Her new work, «we wear our wheels with pride and slap your streets with colour … we said «bonjour» to satan in 1820 …» will be performed in Zurich. Historian and writer Edna Bonhomme spoke with Orlin about her long and celebrated career, how she worked under apartheid, and the significance of healing.
Edna Bonhomme: You grew up in South Africa. Please tell me a little bit about your childhood and how it was to grow up in that country.
Robyn Orlin: I was born in 1955 and grew up during apartheid. I come from a Jewish family; they came as refugees, from Lithuania and Poland between the First and Second World Wars. I am a first generation South African. Jews were not accepted by the British or the Dutch (Afrikaners) at the time and I can remember when I was young, driving past a golf course with my family and reading a sign saying «NO DOGS, AFRICANS, OR JEWS» allowed. My parents spoke a lot about politics, I was informed at a young age. I never went to private schools or anything like that. My family were farmers in Lithuania and lent towards the left. My mother was a dancer. She was a ballet dancer but could never get into a company because she was too tall. So, she started doing modern dance, and that’s how I was introduced to contemporary dance.
Can you tell me what inspired you during your dance career – apart from your mother?
I decided I wanted to be more serious about dance and earned a scholarship to study at the London School of Contemporary Dance, I never really settled into the British way of life, and on completing my four-year course, I returned to South Africa at the beginning of the eighties. On my return, there was only place for classical ballet in white communities, and I was not particularly interested in myself with that aesthetic. I started working downtown Johannesburg with the Federated Union of Black Artists and the Market Theatre. At the time both very political and engaged organisations. My main mentor was the late Barney Simon (artistic director of the Market Theatre), he was both my political and conceptual guide. He worked with elements of storytelling as a vehicle to find a South African vocabulary. From him, I learnt to be inspired by and pay attention to whatever was around me, to dig deeply into material and find importance as well as magic with as little as possible when making work.
What philosophical traditions inform your vision and choreographic practice and whom do you consider your interlocutors?
In the late eighties, I discovered and was inspired by a book by the Senegalese dancer and choreographer, Germaine Acogny (the mother of dance in Africa). For me it became my survival kit and bible for digging deeper. The book, «African Dance» shifts the story of dance to Africa away from the European gaze and offers on many levels a more fluid African identity and opens artistic strategies that are more accessible to an African way of thinking and moving.
The piece you are showing at the Theater Spektakel, «we wear our wheels with pride […]», begins with a dialogue, and there is also the incorporation of expansive music shifts and modulation, the body is filled with language. How did you decide to incorporate sound into that production?
My childhood memories are a permanent fixture and source of inspiration. These memories seem to have found a place in my immediate work. I’ve been going on this journey with my pieces. We start the piece with finding a way to contact our ancestors and end the piece with thanking them for their patience with and acceptance of us. Sound, movement vocabulary and text propel the piece forward. The Rickshaws have a long history at the turn of the 20th century in South Africa. They were slaves and used to transport the colonisers and their goods. In Zulu they are called «Hashishi», meaning «horse», later when cars and trucks came into the picture, they lost their use and became a «holiday experience» on the beachfront of Durban (KwaZulu Natal), exciting the white tourists, who were riding with them at the back of their rickshaws. They kept up their tradition of colourful costumes and competing with one another, only to become slaves of another economy and to this day they still exist but not on the same level as during the time of apartheid, for they still do not have ownership of their rickshaws and are still being owned by some higher system. Universally most rickshaws around the world have moved to bicycles and scooters, this was not the case in South Africa. It was important to access the sounds that I heard when I was a child and saw for the first time what I thought were flying angels. The musicians and the dancers, although too young to know these sounds, tried to find these feelings and incorporated them in the work. Sound, movement images are created real-time, looping everything at the same time to create the urgency, beauty, and pain in the space, and allowing us to pay tribute to these «unsung heroes».
«we wear our wheels with pride […]» is a collaboration with the dance company Moving Into Dance Mophatong. Can you tell me a bit about the history of the group, that is to say, when and where did they form?
Moving into Dance Mophatong was established in 1978 during the apartheid in South Africa. It was an artistic response to the destructive policy of separateness. The vision was to draw on the creative capacity of the human spirit to connect, enliven and transcend. Dance as an antidote to division. Today, the company continues its performance through Afrofusion Dance. One principle that unites the movement is fostering a community as human beings and Africans. Moreover, the organisation values social justice and tries to enable hope.
And what is your relationship to this group, and how did you decide to work with them?
I have been working on and off with the company for a long time now. Both choreographing and mentoring. The company’s founder Sylvia Glasser was one of my teachers when I was younger, and I deeply respect all her work to set a platform for the younger generation of dancers in South Africa.
What do you want the audience to procure from «we wear our wheels with pride […]»?
I hope the audience will be willing to journey with the performers, as they find a way to thank their ancestors for guiding them through their performance and helping them to pay homage to the rickshaws.
We must not forget. We must find ways to heal.
How does the audience shape the responses to your dance pieces? Is there a different reception in Western Europe versus Southern Africa? And if so, can you describe the distinction?
The audience is always important in my work, this participation is used as a device to bring the public into the piece, to be part of the performance, and eventually break that barrier between audience and performer. There are different responses from Europe to South Africa. My public in South Africa is racially mixed which is not the case in Western Europe or North America. That is the reality of the world right now.
Credits
Interview: Edna Bonhomme
Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science, and writer based in Berlin, Germany. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and elsewhere.