Lorin
Sookool
Performance | Direction | Facilitation | Writing
My body is a loaded symbol.
It is a terrain of protest, survival, and sacred remembering.
Born into a liminal racial identity in South Africa classified as “coloured” and raised within the remnants of colonial institutions with its lingering socio-psychological injuries — I have inherited both a burden and a boldness.
I allow my practice to be in constant conversation with my life, my heritage, and lived experience. My dance-making begins not with form but with fire - with desire, contradiction, memory, and resistance.
It begins not with form but with fire. From a need to Dala - which is to act, to create, to fight - on my own terms. From the raw necessity to speak from a place ungoverned by colonial or even popular expectation.
I do not move to replicate what has been, but to discover what is needed now.
My practice is not bound by fixed themes or past achievements.
Rather, it follows a deep listening - to body, spirit, memory and moment.
I avoid being captured like a thief in the night.
My creations ask questions, hold complexity, and refuse easy answers.
It is less about spectacle and more about assertion - of being, of becoming, of burning paths where none existed.
This is how I Dala.
This is the work I must do.
Bio
Lorin Sookool (she/her/they/them) is a South Afrikan contemporary artist with a foundation in dance. Her professional trajectory began at The Playhouse Company (Durban, KwaZulu-Natal) and The Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative (Mpumalanga). She has worked with multiple choreographers and residency bodies, with international performances in Mozambique, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada and the UK. Her artistic practice follows a process-based approach that is intuitive in nature and emergent in design, searching for the relationship between personal and collective themes; thereby becoming a reflective, reflexive, subject-centred practice. Sookool often explores complex South Afrikan socio-political themes, with a focus on situations of racial, gendered, systemic and institutionalized violence. She is currently a Master of Arts candidate at the University of Cape Town, through a scholarship from the Institute for Creative Arts. Her first publication, Dala What You Must: A Manifesto, will form part of Queer Dance vol II (University of Michigan), to be published early 2026. She is the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Dance recipient (2023), the Pina Bausch Fellowship for Choreography recipient (2021), a mother, seeker and amateur astrologist often gazing towards the planets in contemplation of their archetypal meaning, in relation to this complex and multi-dimensional planet.
Featured Offerings
Woza Wenties!
In this semi-autobiographical solo Sookool traces the erasure of her specific experience of blackness through various forms of colonially-informed institutions, including dance. "Wenties" refers to the Durban so-called coloured township from which she stems, Wentworth, while "woza", meaning "come", reflects her mission to recentre her own subjectives through her artistic practice. Using visual, theatrical and improvisational devices, Sookool's body signifies a body under duress, in pursuit of freedom. The work premiered at the Liverpool Biennial 2023 and has been presented at dance festivals in Durban, Mozambique, United Kingdom, Germany and Canada.
Identity, spirituality, decoloniality.
Cash Cow
In this immersive duo performance Sookool traces a reflection on the intersectionality of feminist politics, pop culture and cultural tradition , through an interpellation of modern-colonial expectations of the African dancing body. The work was created as part of Sookool's final Master of Arts thesis in 2024 and is currently in development for a European premier in October 2025. Below is a teaser link to its first iteration.
Performance politics, commerciality, culture, tradition, intersectional feminism.
3 Mense Phakathi
Designed through an emergent process spanning many months with multiple public showings, Sookool offers a trio that has become a conversation about power relations, perceivable within South African civil society and dance production itself. The three dancers embody a call for "power to the people" through choreographic choices that allow for them to be seen, first as humans and second as humans with the power of choice. The work first premiered at the National Arts Festival in 2024 as the choreographer's award for the Standard Bank Young Artist for Dance. It will debut in Cape Town February 2025 as a Double bill featuring Woza Wenties! as the opening performance.
Featured Projects
Naledi Award Nomination 2022
Prayer Room
Prayer room is an audio-visual response to a two-month telephonic research process which looked into to the lived realities and perceptions of support, of three senior citizens based in Durban, during Covid-19. It was created through Co-Residency, a remote residency that aims to assist artists in crisis, over 12 weeks during the Covid-19 pandemic.
#ColouredConversations: The Forgotten Ones
Arts and Culture Trust
This project aimed to create an intergenerational dialogue within the community of Wentworth around topics such as the term ‘coloured’, what this grouping has meant historically and politically, Wentworth as a community “pre” and “post” Democracy, and the daily realities of these participating senior citizens.
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Mulato Sujo?
A live music and dance performance held 30 Oct - 1 Nov 2020 at Theatre Arts in Cape Town.
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Pro Helvetia Johannesburg
This was initially a research project entitled Mixed Not Diluted in which Sookool would have travelled to Mozambique. The manifestation of the project had to be adapted due to the COVID-19 global pandemic.
The project commenced as a one-on-one workshopped creation process with Mozambican-born Cape Town based dancer/musician Sumalgy Nuro.
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What resulted was an intimate live performance centered around aspects of identity which was reviewed on The Cape Robyn.
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