'Body Politics' and negotiating gender violence and child sexuality through Flatfoot Dance Company's youth arts intervention programmes in KwaZulu-Natal - a case study (2003 - 2013)

This Perspective offers a feminist engagement with the 'dancing body' and the languages which it articulates and which it inscribes, in order to examine how social, cultural and political discourse and ideology permeate the use and reading of this body. This is done through the lens of looking at Flatfoot Dance Company's dance education and youth dance development programmes run in KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa), and their focus on challenging (amongst other things) the construction of sexual subjectivity of both the male and female youth and children who dance in their various programmes. This Perspective asks that in stepping into the difficult terrain of looking at childhood sexuality and how it is constructed, normalised, challenged, gendered and expressed, there is the need to include the arena of cultural practice as a terrain that teaches, negotiates and enacts sexuality. Flatfoot Dance Company works from the critical understanding that children' s sexuality and its expression, should not be assumed to be non-existent.