We wear our wheels with pride and slap your streets with color… we said ‘bonjour’ to satan in 1820…

Born in South Africa, Robyn Orlin still vividly remembers the time of apartheid.
Her memories include Durban’s rickshaws, the small handcarts pulled by black people and carrying whites. What struck her at the time was not so much seeing the exploitation of man by man in its harshest light, but rather the dignity of these rickshaw pullers dressed in costumes whose elegance and beauty were evidence of their creativity and desire to resist humiliation. Bedecked with feathers, stones, pearls and bovid horns on their heads, through their dress they subverted the dehumanisation to which they were subject. She says that when they ran, these workers “seemed to dance, their bodies hanging aloft”. By sharing her memories with a young generation of dancers from South Africa, Robyn Orlin brings to the stage a battle for dignity and equality, showing that, then as now, it can be waged in art and creative self-expression.