Black Van Club - On The Mic
Welcome to "Black Van Club - On The Mic," the podcast that shines a spotlight on the vibrant Black events, talent, and culture in Vancouver, Canada. Join us as we delve into the heart of the city's thriving Black community, uncovering the events, stories, achievements, and unique perspectives that make this culture so rich and diverse.
Tune in to get inspired, informed, and connected with the pulse of Black Vancouverites. Join the conversation and celebrate the vibrant tapestry of Black culture right here, in the heart of one of Canada's most dynamic cities.
Black Van Club - On The Mic
Lorin Sookool
In this episode of Black Van Club - On The Mic, we sit down with South African contemporary artist and dancer Lorin Sookool to explore her journey, her powerful work “Woza Wenties,” and the importance of decolonization in dance. Lorin shares how her upbringing in Durban, South Africa, shaped her artistic voice, and how she challenges traditional dance forms by centering her own story and rejecting colonial expectations of movement.
She unpacks the complexities of racial identity in South Africa, the impact of apartheid on perceptions of Black and Coloured communities, and the need for young dancers to embrace authenticity in their craft. Lorin also offers advice to aspiring artists on finding supportive communities and creating work that truly reflects their experiences.
This episode also highlights Lorin’s upcoming performances at the Vancouver International Dance Festival on March 5th and 7th. Make sure to witness her groundbreaking piece live.
Follow Lorin on Instagram to stay connected with her work! @koolsokool
Check her out in Vancouver. https://vidf.ca/lorin-sookool.html
Podcast Intro
Podcast Outro
Welcome to Black Van Club on the Mic, a digital platform for Black creatives and events in Vancouver. I'm your host, ruvie, and today I'm really excited to be speaking with an incredible guest, award-winning South African contemporary artist with a foundation in dance, lauren Sukul. Lauren specializes in performance, direction, facilitation and writing. Lauren is in Vancouver as part of the Vancouver International Dance Festival, where she'll be performing her solo piece on March 5th and 7th Waza Winties, a powerful work that blends dance, storytelling and history in a way that really makes you think. Her work explores themes of identity, colonization and the role of the Black African body in dance. Welcome to the show, lauren, and welcome to Vancouver.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you so much, and I've got to say your pronunciation of my name and the title of my work was so on point, well done god, that's.
Speaker 1:I've been practice. I was practicing. I was like I hope I say it right. Yeah, you got it. I got approval from the creator herself. So, oh wait, thank you. Well, I'm glad to have you here and speak more about your work, that you're doing um, and what vancouver um event goers can can expect. So for those who might not be familiar with work and yourself, can you give us a little bit of an introduction how you describe who you are, where you're from and what you do?
Speaker 2:Okay cool. Well, I describe myself as an artist with a foundation in dance. I describe myself as an artist with a foundation in dance because I widely spoken about, or, you know, not comfortable to talk about, and so it becomes about, you know, fine tuning the medium and using the medium and questioning the medium that you come into your artistry with. Um, so yeah, but my, my training is all in dance. Um, I am a hun that basically passed through like studio formats, things you know, modern dance, ballet, hip hop, tap dance, gymnastics, like name it and I kind of always knew that I wanted to continue dancing and then my folks were just like okay, cool, if you want to do that, then you need to study it. It's not real if you don't have a paper right, oh, my gosh African parents.
Speaker 2:Exactly, but I'm grateful that they were at least supportive of the fact because a lot of you know, not everybody even has that support.
Speaker 1:No, no, I can definitely relate. You know, I'm African, I'm from Zimbabwe originally, so I understand when it comes to the arts, and sometimes not through their own fault but, like you said, through other forces.
Speaker 2:And the condition.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they may not understand that, the art forms that are there and available for the children you know to express themselves outside of the norms that they, they were raised through. In terms of the dance, you said you were in it from a young upbringing. So was this through just school or through friends, or this was something that you just naturally were inclined to?
Speaker 2:track slightly and say that. So the title of my work is warza went um. Warza means come in isizulu, and then wenties is the affectionate term for a so-called colored area that I come from, and maybe we can unpack that term. But uh, wentworth is um, an area specifically allocated for people, labelled coloured, in Durban, south Africa, and my mother moved us out of Winsworth when I was like three and a half years old. So we moved to, like you know, a previously allocated like white area which was now under the apartheid system. So, post 1994, democracy three and a half, we moved to this area that was now becoming populated with people of different races.
Speaker 2:However, the school that I went to was very much. You know, this is how you talk, this is how you walk, this is how you be, is how you talk, this is how you walk, this is how you um, and so it's important to note that. You know, I discovered dance through that kind of um avenue, but the way I got into it was quite fluid and organic. I was five years old, I was in um, like the, the, the, the class just before you go to level one, like grade one, um, and I just noticed that these girls, like little girls were dressed into pink outfits on fridays and then go across to the big school and I was just really curious as to what it is that they were doing in those really strange looking clothes. Right, why? Why are you guys dressed heads? Because I was also quite a tomboy as a kid, like, yeah, I had scars on my knees, like my hair was always standing up and like these pink leotards and pink tights, pink skirts were like just so short yeah, so anyway, one day my my
Speaker 2:mom used to pick me up late because she was, um, yeah, she, she worked quite a bit one day after school. Uh, I just followed. I just followed those girls to the big school and, um, yeah, I, I fell in love with what, with what they were doing, um, running around on our toes, we were imagining things, and it just seemed like the most, um, creative, free, uh thing that I had experienced. And it involved my body and I guess I had that natural inclination to moving with my body. So I told my mom yo ma, listen, there's this thing that's happening and you just need to get involved.
Speaker 2:So I literally took her hand when she picked me up and I took her across the road to the teacher and I said meet you and make a plan. I need to come to these classes. And so it started with ballet at school, uh, and then eventually I discovered there was a dance studio in my area, picked up modern and tap and all of that, and, yeah, so age five, and continued all the way. Um, so it's been many years dancing, wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's amazing that you had that intuition and that initiative to even you know, lead your mom and be like this is what I want to do. You know most of us go through life we don't even know what we want to do. So the fact that you recognize that, at least recognize your love for it, and love at a young age, that's amazing, and thank you for sharing that Sure.
Speaker 2:I like to say that dance found me, in that sense, um, and I think, yeah, I'm naturally just quite a person who goes for what they want. Man, you know, like if I am pulled towards something, then I I do follow it, you know.
Speaker 1:So those combined um have led me here so I know you touched on it a little bit in your explanation earlier. So about was a winties and your, I guess, racial background and I guess political history of south africa in terms of apartheid, um, being colored and also navigating the african space. So I wonder, wonder, if you could elaborate more on that. So I guess for people in North America they may not understand the nuances, I guess in the colored culture and in the context of the South African and greater African culture and diaspora culture and diaspora.
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, these racial categories are, you know, the legacy of the apartheid system, as you've already mentioned, which in itself is a legacy of the colonial imperial mission right, divide and conquer, colonial imperial mission, right, divide and conquer, and basically that meant that the white minority, white supremacy, even though it was the minority, basically treated all other races differently. So the darker your skin was, the worse you were treated, the lighter your skin was slightly better treated. But if you were not white, then you were not treated as well as white. And treated means you know access to, you know voting power, which bench to sit on, which seat to swim, in which place you can live in, what kind of education you get. And so colored people which are, you know, this is a it's not a homogenous group by any means. It simply means that there is racial, ancestral, mixed ancestral lineages.
Speaker 2:I know in other contexts people use the word Creole or Creolization. It's, over time, this grouping of people, because of the systematized way of putting people in, allocating spaces to these different people, over time, people who look something like me, so like lighter brown, a culture forms, and so when people speak about colored identity, they talk about, you know, the kind of the ways of being, the foods that are eaten, the music that's played. You know the art that's happening. This forms over time and becomes a kind of culture. But as I said, it is. You know it's not a homogenous story and also, you know South Africa is quite a big country, so I'm east of South Africa, so Durban and colored people from Durban have a different way of speaking, a different way of being to say colored people from Durban have a different way of speaking, a different way of being To say colored people from the Western Cape, which is there's actually more of a microphone on that and how the Cape and how the people move there, and the Malay, the food, there's more discussion around that aspect of colored identity is on on on my side.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I think, coming up in the dance industry, I, I. And before I even say that, let me just say that this is a contested term, let me mention that More and more people are refusing this term and I personally believe that one of the brutal successes of this term was to psychologically de-link colored people from the African lineage because, for example, in my, in my instance, moving to this previously white area, white allocated area, going to a you know quote-unquote white school and being encouraged to speak English and also being brought up by parents who also had a you know, let's say say, the kind of psychological, the perception that is, you know, towards that kind of Eurocentric thing. English is right and, you know, christianity is right and all these things.
Speaker 2:This means that I also wasn't encouraged in my home to maintain my links to African identity, and what's very important to me is, like African spirituality, I've had, to like, dig and figure out things on my own um, as I, you know, awaken with time, yeah, um, and so, yeah, coming up in the dance industry and and watching, uh, a lot of the works which were actually mostly created by, quote-unquote, black African people, I never really felt a sense of um resonance with what I was seeing. Obviously, right, because I had a different story. Um, and even then, when I began to travel abroad and started to see other works from the continent, I still felt like I wasn't seeing my own story, and so this work kind of arose from that underlying bubbling feeling. You know what is my conversation, what is my story and how do I bring this story to the stage? You know global kind of the stage.
Speaker 1:You know global kind of um, um awareness you know um yeah I've answered yeah, no, you went into very detail like, oh wait, okay, definitely spoke on that.
Speaker 1:I think that is something that people haven't been brought, that hasn't been brought to light or educated the nuances of that in the global scale and I, like you said, I guess I never thought about the, I guess the decolonization of the mind and you know the, I guess the categories and that how, how it has affected us as Black Africans, as colored people, and causing almost a divide but also causing also a unique experience as well, that should be recognized and should be brought to the forefront and be recognized, I guess, based on that response and what you've shared. So your work obviously often challenges the traditional ideas and the systems that you shared. So how do you hope your performance will make people think differently and how you convey that through dance and your work?
Speaker 2:Let me start by expressing what I've been thinking and writing about as of late. You know there's the big D word, decoloniality, which exists because of coloniality, which I think, and I know we know that it is not to decolonize. It's beyond a metaphor. There are institutions and systems that need to be decolonized, but there is also a color, an ongoing coloniality of our perception, which I see all the time at home and I see it on the dance stages. So, even if the steps are quote-unquote Afrofusion or quote-unquote African contemporary, which I think that those terms can be questioned themselves the form, the overall structure of how a work is presented is still very much something that has been fed to us, and I think part of this work of decoloniality, which is an ongoing rehearsal and experiment, has to be, and we can't be afraid of failure in trying to find other ways that center our own subjectivities. I'm just looking for other ways of sharing a dance-based work and I hope that Wazowenties is doing that in some way. You know it's dance-based, so don't come expecting anything actually and, however, come expecting to see this, all that I'm talking about, expressed through the movements. You know the steps are not steps that I've been given or using steps that I've been given to say something.
Speaker 2:Funny story I won't expose the platform, but one of the platforms I offered the work on, my, my vinyl player blue, just before.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there was an issue with tech and, just like vinyl player bust, I had no sound, wow. But you know I'm not the type to, you know, get a fright and run away. I'm like, ok, if that's what the universe is giving right now, then that's what we're doing. So I did it without sound and I realized through that that what I'm talking about is visible in, in, in the movements itself. It's not driven by music, which is often a lot of what dance can be right, it's like without the music, then, not to say that the dance doesn't have an in, like an embodied music, but the music often drives the, the movement um. I'd like to believe that I'm I'm not doing that, and so this is just one way that I think and hope that the work is kind of like interpolating, like expectations of what a dance-based um is, you know, and really putting in the front like the conversation that I'm trying to have, like the message that I'm trying to portray.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, thank you for sharing that. That's eye-opening. And also, I actually went and looked at um on your youtube page you had a little snippet of warza winties, like a little snippet from, I guess, a past performance, and I was just struck by the difference in the way you move your body, the presentation, um, even the stage, the way it was set up.
Speaker 1:well, from that performance I'm not sure if it's the same every performance- yeah and it was extremely, I guess, powerful, even the small clip, it was powerful and was also unique from what I've traditionally seen, uh, in terms of dance coming out of africa, because I guess there is a and that's in itself as well about what African dance is, which is traditional, the stuff that maybe is presented to tourists, which is also culturally accurate to our past, but also, I guess it doesn't leave room for the contemporary aspect, or different forms or modalities of dance and how it is presented.
Speaker 1:Yes, you are presenting it in a different way that is not within the stereotype. I guess um of what african dance is in quotes. If you can see the people who are listening, it's an air quotes African. So yeah, thank you for sharing that.
Speaker 2:If I can add to that my sister, that is directly because of the fact that I do not fit into the stereotype of what unquote African is. Yeah, why? And so when I say I feltusioned by what I was seeing, especially on international stages, of what is quote-unquote African, I had to then, in order to answer that question for myself, center my story myself. You know, um, and what I also wanted to say was oh, okay, this is a chat, all the things that you said, yes, and but also, um, I think, I think, um, I'm a bit nervous to say it, but no, say it, go ahead. I think that you know, when something becomes, there's a certain success in presenting work from the continent in a certain way, especially internationally, and I don't know how different that is to European folk sitting and gawking at Sarki, batman, mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:A sort of voyeurism, a sort of performance.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Performance, like performance expectation to be. Are you African enough, or, I guess sort of curiosity that's not so good in some ways.
Speaker 2:Well, it just should be questioned, right, and often, like, there are no shirts involved. You know, like the masks are out. You know, yeah, the drums used in a certain way. You know, I'm just like how honest are we being, and how contemporary are we being?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess I could. I mean I'm not like, how honest are we being and how contemporary are we being? Yeah, I guess I could. I mean I'm not a dancer, but I guess I could parallel that with certain expectations. When black people walk in the room of performing blackness or being blackness or representing blackness, and if you don't fit into that mold seems like you kind of upset the apple cart, to say, or the expectations that they have and like whoa, okay, this is a little bit different you know, I feel like a lot.
Speaker 2:A lot of people listening will resonate with yeah, yeah, yeah definitely, and I think that, as young people, we need to follow that dissatisfaction and that noticing and in some ways I feel like wars of entities is kind of like. It's like it's storytelling, it's an explanation of how and why I am the way I am as a mover, but it's still in a way okay.
Speaker 2:It's not very narrative because I don't think my well, not narrative in a linear way, my stuff's not linear narrative, but it's, I'm explaining, I'm like, okay, this is how you know Lauren Suku, is this African dancing human? But moving forward, I feel like I'm just going to be making decisions, knowing that. So, like moving forward, like people must not expect anything just because of color of skin, gender, sexuality, you know, place of origin, like no, you know, because really that's what we need to get to like just moving beyond all this horizontal, divided nonsense, because the real problem is not a horizontal problem. The real problem is a is a vertical one. Right, it's another thing. Um, and so, yeah, sure, lots, lots to actually say on that.
Speaker 1:yeah, there's so many, it's such a layered conversation and I think you know your work is doing the work in addressing that, I guess, and bringing to the forefront and addressing some of those things and challenging the system. I know you have a busy day tomorrow and the rest of the week so I guess last I could end up on. What can you say, to guess, a young black or African or anybody who's interested, a person of color who's interested in dance and you know, maybe they're discouraged by the community around them you know we're not so open to it or they just don't know where to start. What can you say to them and in terms of pursuing their dreams and having their work and message um be brought to light?
Speaker 2:um, I, I led a workshop, uh, yesterday at the Society of Vancouver and there was a young black female who came up to me afterwards and said how nice it was for her to be led by a black woman and to be in a class where there were just other black people, because right now dancing for them is just being in a room with white people and you know, that just has some like psychological things. Yeah, and I recognize the difficulty. I can have empathy for the difficulty that it must be to be black in this place, like being the minority, like yo guys. Yeah, no, that it's.
Speaker 2:It can't be easy, it can't no I mean, I live in a place where it's it's black majority, but we, what we are fighting is a Eurocentric majority vision, so it's also tough. But yeah, when it's on the skin and it's every day and the racism is like subtle and I understood it myself this morning like subtle, subtle.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, vancouver, canada, is the queen, the land of subtle racism. It's there, but never so pervasive.
Speaker 2:And, of course, that gnaws away at your confidence. It makes you doubt yourself, and so, as a segue into my response, I just want to say notice that, like trust, when your vibes are saying this is not it. Okay, you might not always have the room to speak it, but at least just notice it and don't doubt yourself because of how it's looking and feeling around you. Don't doubt yourself. What I want to say is move how you want to move in this world. Move how you want to move in the dance room. Move how you want to move professionally. Move how you want to move in the supermarket. Move how you want to move with people. Cut people off if they don't make you feel good. Add people to your team if they do make you feel good.
Speaker 2:Be yourself, and in doing that, you will find your community, you, you will find your people, and that transcends race also, not to say that all people pale. Humans are all you know. We know this as well. But just notice that the system is not designed for your confidence raising and conscious raising, and so please make sure that you move how you want to move, and if you're also a mover, a dancer, that includes and I say this now as a mother, because I am a mom of a four-year-old and I don't have any models from home who have shown me what that might be like to be a mother and be a dancer, if you become, if you fall pregnant or you rise in pregnancy who have shown me what that might be like to be a mother and be a dancer you know, if you become, when you fall pregnant or you rise in pregnancy. I like to say Right right, I like that one.
Speaker 2:Then you have to quit. You know you have to find something to stay at home, and I'm at a point where I have molded my life in a way that suits me. I've molded my career around me. I haven't I'm not slaving to any system right now. I am doing what I want to do when I want to do it, and ain't nobody can tell me nothing, because I am keeping the lights on my kid and I are close. You know she's eating, I have friends, you know I'm having a good time, you know. So, uh, I feel even more confident now in moving how I want to move in this life, and I wish, I wish I knew that earlier. So that's just what I want to say to, um, yeah, the soul that might need to hear that now.
Speaker 1:Thank you, that spoke to me as well. It might not be dance, but it applies to what I'm doing here as well, so thank you for sharing that my pleasure. Well, I think we've come to the conclusion of our episode and I would like to thank you, lauren, for coming on to the show. It was a pleasure having you on and, for those listening, lauren will be performing March 5th and the 7th in Vancouver at the Vancouver International Dance Festival, which is on, I guess, from March 2nd to the 22nd. It's on right now. You can go on their website to check out more information. I will link it in the episode description and learn if, uh, people want to keep in touch with you and follow your amazing work around the globe. Where can they keep in contact or follow you?
Speaker 2:yeah, they can find me. I think the best place is is probably instagram. Uh uh, you can just type in my name, but my spelling is like unique, so I can put it in.
Speaker 1:I'll put it in the description uh, so I'll tag it in there so you can check it out. Cool, and uh, make sure you see this lovely, lovely soul perform in Vancouver this week. I'd like to thank you again and listening to this week's podcast of Black Fan Club on the mic.