Lorin Sookool is a South African dance artist with an interdisciplinary practice encompassing performance, text, sound, photography and film.
2023 Biennial Year Find out more
In 2021, Sookool received the Pina Bausch Fellowship, which was spent in co-operation with improvisation and contemporary dance pioneer Roberto Castello (Italy). Improvisation as a decolonial practice has become the foundation of her movement practice and informs the direction of her academic pursuits and facilitation work. Other residencies include The Centre For The Less Good Idea (Johannesburg), Institute for Creative Arts (Cape Town) and Co-Residency (USA), through which her dance film “Prayer Room” received a Naledi Theatre Award nomination for innovation in the Video Online Theatre category. Sookool holds a Bmus in dance from the University of Cape Town, majoring in African Contemporary Dance teaching methods.
Sookool’s work explores complex South African socio-political themes, with a focus on situations of systemic and institutionalized violence through personal trajectories. Their artistic practice has its roots in a practice-based research that is 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.
Liverpool Biennial 2023
'Woza Wenties!' (2023)
Presented at St Luke’s Bombed Out Church, Lorin Sookool’s ‘Woza Wenties!’ (2023) uses dance movement to trace and unpack the violent erasure of her Black identity during her schooling in South Africa. Through a creative process that engages with the political through a very personal, embodied experience, Sookool embarks on a journey of remembering, restoration and repositioning of her Brown body. The artist uses dance to examine the complex and nuanced conditions of her ‘Colouredness’, a specific experience of Blackness within the South African socio-historical, political and cultural context.
Interpreting the dancing body as a previously colonised state, Sookool intends to understand her own erasure by deconstructing the colonial projects undertaken in many South African schools post
Presented at St Luke’s Bombed Out Church, Lorin Sookool’s ‘Woza Wenties!’ (2023) uses dance movement to trace and unpack the violent erasure of her Black identity during her schooling in South Africa. Through a creative process that engages with the political through a very personal, embodied experience, Sookool embarks on a journey of remembering, restoration and repositioning of her Brown body. The artist uses dance to examine the complex and nuanced conditions of her ‘Colouredness’, a specific experience of Blackness within the South African socio-historical, political and cultural context. Interpreting the dancing body as a previously colonised state, Sookool intends to understand her own erasure by deconstructing the colonial projects undertaken in many South African schools post 1994. Despite desegregation, these previously “white-only” institutions enacted violent policies including the regulation of hairstyles and exclusion of African languages. Through the title of the work, Sookool calls for the resurrection of lost aspects of her being and expression; ‘Woza’ is the isiZulu word meaning “come”. ‘Wenties’ is the affectionate term for the Wentworth township, located in Durban South. The area, previously reserved for people of colour, was Sookool’s home before the artist moved to a suburban area to attend school. 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 decolonise the body.
'Woza Wenties!' (2023)
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Lorin Sookool, Woza Wenties!, 2023. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at St Luke’s Bombed Out Church. Photography by Mark McNulty
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Lorin Sookool, Woza Wenties!, 2023. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at St Luke’s Bombed Out Church. Photography by Mark McNulty
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Lorin Sookool, Woza Wenties!, 2023. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at St Luke’s Bombed Out Church. Photography by Mark McNulty
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Lorin Sookool, Woza Wenties!, 2023. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at St Luke’s Bombed Out Church. Photography by Mark McNulty
