ABSTRACT
This case illustrates dance instruction as an intervention using bell hook’s notion of “engaged pedagogy” and Paulo Freire’s ideas about “liberation education”, with youth who have experienced direct, structural and interpersonal violence. The contemporary FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY has spanned across urban, rural and refugee communities for 29 years in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. FLATFOOT aims for learner’s liberation through self-expression while it understands dance and arts education as the development of life skills and the values of self-discipline, self-study, as well as working within a “community”. In the shifted contemporary realities of post-independence corruption, COVID-induced poverty and the increasing widening of the digital and economic gaps in South Africa, the idea of using dance (as an applied performance discipline) to build community and counter violence has entered the company’s frame for creating dance as “living democracy”. FLATFOOT engages in “peace education” through helping the creation of personal spaces for self-realization, belonging and engendering the possibility to hope. This has allowed disenfranchised youth to have their humanity – even fleetingly in this dance work – fully realized. The focus of this case study is on one of FLATFOOT’s dance programs run in 2021 and 2022 for girls and young women whose parents hold the status of refugees in South Africa.
