Orlin’s Anarchy Reigns on the JOMBA! Legacy Platform
By Tammy Ballantyne (Guest Writer from The Ar(t)chive)
Robyn Orlin’s “Beauty remained for just a moment then returned gently to her starting position…” was created on the historic training institution Moving Into Dance Mophatong’s (MID) performance company as part of the celebrations to mark MID’s 21 year anniversary of full-time vocational training in 2012.
Featuring dancers Muzi Shili, Teboho Gilbert Letele, Sunnyboy Motau, Julia Burnham, Sonia Radebe, Thandi Tshabalala and Oscar Buthelezi, Orlin produced a raucous new theatre dance work uniting dance, text and image plus audience participation and props with her unique humour and virtuosity.
Adrienne Sichel wrote in a review for The Star Tonight: “Orlin’s signature anarchic manipulation is on the rampage in this multi-media conceptual circus which, in its quest of what African beauty is, unleashes her take on the exotic, the erotic, the ordinary and the unusual.”
Orlin commented: “One of the main co-producers, Mathias Leridon and his wife, Gevane, are very strong supporters of African art and love the continent. They asked me to make a piece about the beauty of Africa, not always the hard and difficult things about Africa…and being out of Africa for a while, I was very ready to tackle this.”
She returns to the city, Joburg, in which she was born and grew up, trying to find the essence of beauty in the streets and so, a collaboration with fashion designer, Marianne Fassler was born. Orlin explained: “I wanted to work with our amazing South African capacity to recycle…who else to work with but Marianne…the costumes are core of the beauty that we are talking about.” Fassler has taken plastic bags, cans, chip packets, plastic water bottles and turned them into wearable objets d’arts.
Working with Yogin Sullaphen to create the musical collage and Philippe Laine’s video art, Orlin succeeds in drawing the audience into the action as she focusses on the deconstruction of the notions of beauty, ‘colonial voyeurism’ and ‘exoticism’.
Orlin’s work can be streamed for a limited time, at 19:00 (SAST) on 3rd September and again at 12:00 (SAST) on 4thSeptember via https://jomba.ukzn.ac.za/whats-on-today
