DANCE: Andrew Wilson
When you open the cupboard and Christmas comes tumbling out again this year, and you’ve had it with tinsel and tides of Santa Clauses, get to the dance factory at the Newtown Precinct for a double tot of the real thing, where over forty inner-city primary school children from Fairview to Fordsburg will show you exactly what goes at the top of the tree.
Called The Gift, creator Nadine Segal’s creative movement and dance programme is a celebration of innocence, talent, and the joy of discovery through movement. It does not sacrifice creativity for cuteness. It is a colourful, honest programme that bears testimony to the educational and liberating qualities of creative movement.
When dance factory director Suzette Le Sueur saw a dearth of home-grown entertainment on offer in the inner-city, she refocused the dance factory’s role as an instrument of the community by concentrating on the needs of the community on its doorstep, and Nadine Segal was invited to run Saturday workshops culminating in a show at the end of six weeks.
According to Nadine, the daunting task promised a challenge, and delivered far more. Once the process of progressing from basic creative movement to more structured dance began, she realised that she was in the very privileged position of unleashing a tornado of creative exuberance and enthusiasm.
She saw energies which, in a city starved of cultural space and interest, acted as a creative green lung amid the violence and squalor.
Nadine is ecstatic. ‘None of these kids could really dance before. If I’d told them at the beginning that they’d be able to achieve what they did here, they’d have thought I was mad’.
Nadine’s enthusiasm for the concept comes not from a vague notion of civic duty or social conscience, but from the grassroots experience of meeting a need in the community head-on.
She is philosophical. ‘Every participant who began this process has in one way or another been enriched by what was offered. The good that this has done cannot be measured. The title of the programme is very apt. Gifts have been given and received on many different levels.’
The Gift is very much a group effort, with assistance coming from The Peacemakers from Meadowlands and the groups Youth Stand Together and Devonshy from Alexandra. With the continued support of the Department of Arts, culture, science and technology, as well as the greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, Nadine hopes for bigger things.
‘I’d like the project to grow into a bi-annual event incorporating inner-city schools and eventually the greater part of Johannesburg’.
The Gift is on at the dance factory, Newtown Precinct, Johannesburg, until December 24