ABOUT COMMUNITY DANCE ENGAGEMENT
FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY has twenty-five years of community dance engagement work behind its name. We work with about 600 children and youth (both urban and rural, ranging from 6 to 23yrs) per year in our city of Durban/eThekwini. We work with the philosophy and methodology first articulated by educational expert Paulo Freire. This Brazilian born revolutionary’s idea of “liberation education” was primarily about allowing systems of learning that not only educate but also liberate, which allowed for self-expression and self-realisation. At FLATFOOT we understood dance and arts education (within a South African context) to be the ideal methodology for teaching life skills and for teaching youth the value of discipline, self-study and working within a strong sense of “community”.
We are especially mindful of working in communities that often lack sustained access to arts education and learning. We step in, often in very good partnerships with local schools, to run dance programmes in the afternoons (after school) or weekends that allow learners to freely choose to participate and commit. On the most basic level, these programmes offer recreation, and on the deeper more sustained level, the learners who participate get to experience community, learn group skills and are offered a learning environment that seeks to fully affirm and nurture their humanity.
Our Township dance programmes include:
Project DUDLU NTOMBI (Umlazi)
Project HHESHE NSIZWA (Umlazi)
SIYAKHULA DANCE PROJECT
(KwaMashu)
