Staging South African artistic resistance beyond history and oppression

<We Wear Our Wheels with Pride (and slap your streets with color… We said ‘bonjour’ to satan in 1820)> takes its motif from images of Zulu men pulling small rickshaws in the streets of Durban transporting white people under apartheid in the 1970s. Robyn Orlin was deeply impressed by the pride and gestures of resistance expressed through their costumes, adorned with feathers, pearls, jewels, and cow horns. She recalls that they “seemed to dance, the body floating in the air,” and says that their movements came across not as labor for survival, but as an artistic act subverting dehumanization. This period also coincided with the creation of Moving into Dance Mophatong (hereafter MIDM), a company nourished by Zulu traditions and a flagship for contemporary dance in South Africa.

<We Wear Our Wheels with Pride> features “rickshaw dance,” which was created by Robyn Orlin. Dancers express their thirst for the joy of life and their spirit of unyielding resistance against any oppression through dance and song. Anelisa Stuurman (Annalyzer)’s vocals and Yogin Sullaphen’s music add emotional depth to the work, blending slam poetry with both traditional and contemporary Khoisan music. In this production, Robyn Orlin collaborates with eight young dancers to commemorate Black history in an artistic return to a common source. She passes down the memory of the past to the younger generation through art, continuing the struggle for dignity and equality. <We Wear Our Wheels with Pride> is a tribute to the rickshaw drivers of South Africa and an homage to the unyielding creativity and dignity that endures even under oppression. It is also a celebration of South Africa's cultural identity.