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In Woza Wenties!, Lorin traces and unpacks the violent erasure of her Black African identity during her formative years. It references codes of conducts of the schooling system, church rituals and classical dance classes which may be described as agents of the colonial project.
Movement and visual language are used to examine the complex and nuanced conditions of her ‘colouredness’, a specific experience of Blackness within the South African context, thereby embarking on a journey of remembering, restoration and repositioning of her Brown body.
Lorin Sookool, photo Mariano Silva
Using dance movement as a tool to symbolise a body under duress, Sookool references colonial and modernist systems of dance techniques and uses improvisation as a means to decolonize the body.
“Decoloniality for me is an ongoing practice that is motivated by a need to question, unmake, dismantle, reinvent longstanding institutions and logics that have been defined by the colonial matrix of power centring Euro approaches. I’m searching for epistemological freedom and a localized perception. Our perception has been colonized.”
“Academic writers Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez have used the term “aestheSis” – not aesthetics – because aesthetics have already been defined by the modern colonial project. I’m looking for a localized “aestheSis” that centres my own subjectivity so that I can decide my own points of value and scales of evaluation in order to perceive and understand dance making and practice. That is a search.”
“A part of me wonders: Am I in search of my own post-colonial dance or my own indigeneity after the fact? I don’t have the steps. I have to create them. I’m rediscovering my own Blackness.”
Lorin Sookool, photo Mariano Silva
Lorin Sookool is an award winning independent contemporary dance artist with an interdisciplinary practice encompassing performance, text, sound, photography and film. Her work has been performed in many South African platforms and internationally in several Italian cities and most recently, the Liverpool Biennial in the UK. In 2021, Sookool received the Pina Bausch Fellowship award.
Improvisation as a decolonial practice has become the foundation of her movement practice and informs the direction of her academic pursuits and facilitation work. Sookool is a Master of Arts candidate at The Centre for Theatre Dance and Performance Studies (University of Cape Town). Sookool is the 2023 Standard Bank Young Artist of The Year Winner for Dance.
Sookool's artistic creations explore complex South African socio-political themes, with a focus on situations of racial, gendered, systemic and institutionalized violence. Sookool's artistic practice and creative trajectory has its roots in a practice-based research that is deeply intuitive in nature and has an emergent design. It follows a process-based approach that searches for the relationship between personal and collective themes, thereby becoming a reflective, reflexive, subject-centred practice.
