We must eat our suckers with the wrapper on... Variation #1

22 years ago, Robyn Orlin created her iconic piece with the dancers of the Market Theatre Laboratory which engaged with educational campaigns about condom use broadcasted in South Africa that later became internationally famous. The piece combines hope and dark humor in an atmosphere that is laden with a sense of gravitas – it is about AIDS – but also a fierce desire to live and breathtaking sensuality. Dancers are filmed from a high-angle shot with a suspended camera and the images are shown on a screen at the back of the stage in a back-and-forth movement which oscillates between trance and suffering, with moments of silence which interrupt the physical percussions. It is a powerful group piece whose message is “the struggle isn’t over!”. How has that struggle been taken on today? In this new piece co-created with Mosie Mamaregane, a young dancer from the Lab, Orlin revisits her iconic piece in a symphony of red objects, as this avatar of the original piece examines what has and hasn’t changed in the past two decades.

Source: programme of the CND