Dancing was always in Orlin’s blood. Her mother, whose family originally came from Eastern Europe, was a classical ballet dancer and her aunt, Bluma Rubin, was a pioneer of the modern dance movement in South Africa.
“I grew up with dance around me. Though they never spoke about it, at one point my mother and father were ballrrom dance champions –I’ve seen the photos,” says Orlin.
Her father came from a large family in Lithuania, moving to South Africa before the Second World War and leaving school to fight for the British: back then, South Africa was a British colony. After the war he went into the family clothing business, eventually setting up his own warehouse selling clothes to the black population.
Robyn Orlin Photo: Maïwenn Rebours[Missing Credit]
“Men from the mines would dress up in suits and very expensive shoes – what they wanted to be was an English gentleman,” she says.
The injustices of apartheid were not lost on the young Orlin, who is now based in Berlin but who works mainly in France. “It was important for [my parents] for us to know what was going on in South Africa and my mother taught me a lot of politics. I would go with her to mine dances when I was very small – to keep the miners occupied over the weekend they would have dancing competitions between tribes.”
Orlin grew up in Hillbrow, a popular Jewish area in the centre of Johannesburg, which she calls “a shtetl”. She did not go to a Jewish school but says she “didn’t really care” about any antisemitism she encountered outside one.
“My brother, who is older than me, had it much rougher. It is only recently because of the war [Israel’s on Hamas in Gaza] that South Africa has taken quite an antisemitic stance. The Jews’ story is a long one – we have always been excluded, so what can we do? We have to look after ourselves, we become self-reliant, we create our own structures and we educate ourselves.
“The Jews became wealthy in South Africa and wealthy in South Africa meant blood, sweat and tears. They were part of the system…they used what they could access because they were white. There was antisemitism but because Jews were white they could vote.”
We Wear Our Wheels With Pride is being danced by Moving into Dance Mophatong, a contemporary company including a number of Zulu dancers. Orlin does not have her own company, rather preferring to work from project to project with different dancers. The inspiration for the piece comes from chilhood visits to Durban where saw the Zulu men’s colourful rickshaws and their “sprightly dance-like steps. These men were frequently teased and nicknamed “horses” but took great pride in their appearance and strength, she says.
“It was a very important piece to make – for me and the dancers. The older I’m getting, the more I need to work with history and memory.” Even the Zulus in the company knew nothing about the history of the rickshaw men, and Orlin was left to undertake research about them in libraries in the United States, rather than South Africa where there is little on record.
The full title of the piece is actually We Wear Our Wheels With Pride and Slap Your Street With Color…We Said ‘Bonjour’ to Satan in 1820. She gives extraordinarily long titles to most of her works. (Her creation Daddy, I’ve seen this piece six times before and I still don’t know why they’re hurting each other won the Laurence Olivier Award for the Most Outstanding Achievement of the Year in 1999.)
“The pieces have such long titles because when I start a piece it really is not about just one thing,” she explains.
We Wear Our Wheels With Pride[Missing Credit]
Now at 70, she does not enjoy touring: “The older I’m getting, the more exhausted I’m getting! I still miss South Africa very much, my friends and family and try to go back once a year.
She is planning to create a new work next year, and although funding is still a problem for contemporary dance companies in South Africa, she says it is exciting to see the new generation of dancers coming to the fore. “South Africa is a dancing nation…it is the way we express ourselves.”
We Wear Our Wheels With Pride’is at the Southbank Centre, London SE1, 21-22 March. Dance Reflections runs until 8 April at various venues across London
A scene from the dance piece[Missing Credit]